


Last drinks for the patron saint of bleeding hearts

by pushdragon



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-16
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-11 02:58:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 32,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17438642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pushdragon/pseuds/pushdragon
Summary: Never again, they tell him. Eames can never go down into another dream, unless he wants to stay there forever. He does his best to walk away.





	1. Chapter 1

It must be two in the morning by the time Eames takes the chip from his pocket and slips it into the middle of the pile. He’s won decently at the poker table. Not the extravagant sums that would solve his problems but enough to leave him cheerfully confident that he can bear up to whatever’s coming next. It’s a good day. The hallucinations have mostly given way to a crushing headache and mild pixelation in his right eye.

He pushes the pile forward and watches a ten come out, then a six.

The croupier rests her clipped fingernails on the topmost card, waiting. 

Eames doesn’t feel as unlucky as he had yesterday. He tells her, “One more.”

She turns up the jack of spades. “Twenty six.”

Just like that it’s gone, as she draws the pile toward her and racks the chips without registering the odd one out. He gives her a rueful smile, in proportion to a two hundred dollar loss, and pushes away from the table. 

Outside, the roads are glassy with a quickly passed rain shower, and the windows of parked cars glisten in the neon. He takes a cab straight to the airport and lets the randomness of international flight schedules decide his next move for him.

**

Arthur doesn't even get the courtesy of hearing the news direct. The first he knows is from an extractor he worked with in Sao Paolo one time, who comes to him looking for a forger who can handle heavy duty firearms and pick up languages quick. For such a demanding job specification, there's only one candidate, but Fernanda cuts him off.

"Tried him first off. Word is, he's out of the business. I made a pretty generous offer, so he's serious, I guess. Maybe I'll retire too, move back north and start a beach bar, just like I said. But first …"

Arthur gives her the name of a Spaniard who can do a decent job on the Portuguese and perhaps the weapons as well. 

Over the next couple of weeks, he tries Eames's number a few times. It rings out to an automated voice message that could be anyone's. His next job is for the CIA, working on a Pakistani consul – the sort of sweetener that, if pulled off to perfection, ensures the protection he needs to keep slipping in and out of the US without attracting any heat. He has bigger things to worry about than Eames.

**

It's only as the job is wrapping up that the odd rumour comes back to his mind. 

His contact at the CIA cut her teeth in the diplomatic service in China in the early nineties, when Westerners were deeply mistrusted and the slightest lapse in tone could start a diplomatic rift that took a generation to bridge. So he knows it's no off-handed coincidence when she taps the coaster with his scrawled estimate on it and says:

"Even this extravagant fee is eclipsed by private sector rates, I assume. The energy industry, for example, pays its contractors extremely generously."

His skin prickles inside his suit collar. "Our clients don't come to us looking for a bargain. That's not how we work."

"Of course, Arthur. You're the best. And you're going to keep giving us the best. We expect nothing less."

She holds the corner of the envelope a fraction of a second too long before she lets him take it.

**

He looks into Cobb first, since one more betrayal would hardly be a stretch for him. It’s a minute’s work to break his system, disabling the security Arthur set up himself more than a year ago, and less than a day to sort through his phone and bank records and internet history. True to his word, for the last six months he's done nothing more ambitious than renew his architectural registration and sketch out plans for a friend's beach house, in between home schooling his long neglected children and spending a painful amount of money on therapy. He hasn’t had any contact with the industry – not so much as a browser search.

Ariadne is working with a young team out of Shanghai these days. The chemist and the point man both agree she's let nothing slip about her previous job, and they work the other side of the fence from the CIA in any case. 

He values his reputation too dearly to call Saito and ask if he knows who is leaking information about that highly paid, highly confidential job they worked for him.

It's Yusuf he's most suspicious about. Good-humoured, unflappable, salt-of-the-earth Yusuf, who gave into corruption at the first opportunity, and then disappeared back into his network of shady somnacin addicts. And yet it takes him less than a day in Mombasa to run a second line in while Yusuf's testing an experimental batch, and satisfy himself that Yusuf's not the source of the leak either.

On the flight back to Chicago, he stares out the window, at the darkening sky and the ghost of his reflection in it. He doesn't like the conclusion to which his investigations have led him, but that's not a good enough excuse not to act on it. 

**

It takes him nine days to get a lead on Eames's location, and when he does it's so unlikely he almost dismisses it out of hand. 

It's an old alias. After two years of invisibility, Fred Slattery shows up at an exhibition launch in Qatar. There's a picture on the steps of the Islamic Art Museum that confirms it. He looks well turned out, in a grey suit, turning a steadfast smile on the royal sibling he's in conversation with.

Arthur checks and re-checks. There isn't a single extraction team working in the country. For the first time, he considers the possibility that the rumour of Eames's retirement might be true. And from that possibility follows a swift conclusion. A man without a stake in an industry no longer has any reason to keep its secrets. 

A shame. Cobb’s unforgivable treachery on that last job had left them all angry, and Eames had made less effort than any of them to hide it. But the team had parted on good enough terms, and Arthur had thought him too professional for pointless acts of revenge. 

He books a ticket, and follows up with a couple of calls. He already knows how to get the information he needs. It's morally indefensible, but then Arthur didn't earn his place at the top of the industry by allowing scruples to get the better of him.

**

By the time Eames locks the office door behind him, the city outside is reduced to silhouettes of artificial light. The beige corridor that leads him toward the elevator is deserted at this late hour. No-one shares the 52-storey downward journey with him. Only the expats who lack family to break bread with are still working this far into the night.

Eames steps into the black car outside that's waiting to take him back to the sparsely furnished apartment he's rented for the duration of his contract. It's not his usual driver. He's got enough Arabic left over from the occasional job and his teenaged fascination for Lawrence of Arabia to establish that this is Musa’s brother-in-law, who's normally an electrician by trade.

For a few moments, once the small talk is done, he lets the city flow by his window. By night, it's a cold place. The buildings are extravagant, bare shapes carved out of the night by unstinting illumination. Deco style rectangles, a cylinder pinched in the middle, a phallic rocket shape, a fantail crown, a D-shape for the city's emerging name. By night, this civilised glitter is all there is of the city. The sprawling, mud-brick-coloured suburbs and the great desert beyond are erased by darkness, along with the souks and the voices and the sand gritty air, the city’s lifeblood. 

Mind back on business, he puts in a call to one of his supplier's reps in London, who's taking a lackadaisical approach to Eames's request for the shipment of new, gold-embossed brochures he designed. A big city millennial, Nicola can't get her head around how persuasive the physical embodiment of class is to the aristocracy down here. 

"You built the Qatar portal," he counters patiently, "to show how much you value their market. Not because they're going to use it to do business with us." 

"One of Emir's brothers is on Instagram. I think they know what they're doing."

"It's just a toy, the internet, for anyone old enough to have their hands on serious money. What counts here is what someone can reach out and feel. That's what clinches it, every time. And that's why you hired me instead of a piece of conferencing software."

She gives him a spiel about the troubles she's had with the printers: poor alignments, mismatched colours, unpredictable freight schedules. He lets his mind drift and thinks about Cobb waiting out two harried days to cross his path in a Mombasa casino; Arthur getting a whole block of city traffic shut down for that gig in New York. The mark of a professional is getting the job done, no excuses.

"What you do, kid," he interrupts, "is call a rival firm and get a quote. Forward it to your boss and copy the printer in by accident. Do that and you'll have my brochures in time for the last flight out tomorrow."

At home, he fries up a thin steak and an egg, and throws them on top of left-over rice. After dinner, he sits in the single plastic chair in the almost empty flat and pulls up the database he's built of contractors for the FIFA World Cup venues, their directors and managers, and the estimated dates their progress payments are due. Because a man who's just pocketed a 40% profit margin is a man in the market for the most ostentatious furniture Europe can supply. 

There are rich pickings here, and the commission on fitting out a three-bedroom luxury apartment easily runs into five figures. But it's a long game to gain a client's trust, even longer to turn trust into expenditure, and with the competition growing by the week, he needs to make what he can now. All this translates into hours of gruelling solo work. 

As he copies a photo from the internet and pastes it into a diagram of the board of directors of a major concreter, he has a pang of regret for the friction and camaraderie of having a team around him. But not for him any longer, the constant challenge of taming his combative instincts into a hierarchy. Not for him the adrenalin high of dreamworlds opening out like rose petals, one inside the other. 

"Never again," Rashida had said in her office behind the chem engineering labs, at the end of the second week after the Fischer job, when she'd finally diagnosed his hallucinations and plunges into unconsciousness. "Not one more dose. Do you hear me?"

A little after midnight, he turns in. What he could afford when the last of his debts were paid was the cheap side of the building, with its back to the water views. The city lights seep in insistently around the blinds. 

**

When he sees the narrow, dark figure through the glass entry doors, it's Arthur he thinks of. Suits are a little conspicuous among the floating white robes of the moneyed class, and Arthur wears precision tailoring better than men who were born to it. It's been a pretty bleak season in Doha, so he lets himself indulge the illusion.

He almost misses his step when he reaches the foyer and sees that it really is Arthur, down to the slicked-back hair of his point man persona. Arthur straightens and meets his gaze as if they had been expecting one another. 

"Have we met?" Eames asks him pleasantly. "Trade conference in Mainz, wasn't it? Fred Slattery."

Arthur accepts his proffered hand, catches up in the blink of an eye. "Hi Fred. Of course I remember. You were very persuasive. I've got a commission for you. Assuming you're interested, of course."

"Splendid. Come up to my office then, won't you?"

In the lift, he keeps a tight grip on the handle of his case, and quells the urge to straighten his tie, his hair. It's the sort of little change that Arthur would notice, that reveals more than he wants to. He runs a quick mental audit of his office, in case of anything that might need to be hidden, and makes his shoulders slouch into just the right sort of cockiness. It's a good technique for settling the twin waves of suspicion and anticipation that Arthur's sudden appearance have set in motion. 

Eames’s rented business suite is all glass windows and angled walls, heaped in-trays and neat piles of tile samples: symbols of industry placed to create the illusion of a busy workforce comprised of more than just Eames. Arthur pokes his head around one corner and investigates no further. 

"So what's the angle?" Arthur asks as soon as he's seated, casually leafing through the samples for a sofa and curtain fit-out as if they were old buddies met up at a bar. "You sell the real thing and deliver fakes, do you?"

"Something like that," Eames lies with a smile.

"Are you casing out houses for a jewelry heist?"

"Well done, Arthur. What an open book I am."

"Come on, what's the deal?" 

Arthur leans forward and Eames leans back. It's unsettling to be, once again, the focus of that uncompromising gaze. Arthur can make you believe he knows more about you than you know yourself. That's one of the chief weapons in his arsenal, that has drawn some clients to him and driven others away.

Sometimes the truth can be the most effective obfuscation. 

"I'm doing an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, would you believe."

Anyone who knows Eames would laugh at that, but Arthur's face goes perturbed, then his attention slips away towards the city behind Eames's shoulder. 

"Whatever you say," he says. "Look," he says.

Eames leans into the back of his office chair until it creaks and decides to let Arthur do all the work. No doubt about it, it will be a job in need of a forger. Something distasteful, judging by the hesitation.

"I'm putting together a team."

Why Eames doesn't just cut him off then, he couldn't say. Some hopeful spark in him that all their fraught history hasn't quite managed to quench, perhaps. Or maybe he's not ready to admit it to himself yet, that the door has closed for good on that part of his career. A bit of it is, admittedly, that Arthur is miserly with his attention, and metes it out in to-the-point sentences, making Eames's measure the smallest of all. If they've sat together like this before, Arthur has had a set of financials in his lap, or a psych profile taking shape on the screen in front of him. Arthur's conversation is germane to the work at hand, never idle, and never centred on Eames. 

"The job's in the Caymans. Bit of a tight budget but the horizon's as long as we need."

"Oh yes?"

"Within reason."

A big part of it is that the truth is a guillotine for Eames the forger. He's Freddie Slattery forever, once the words come out of his mouth. Once he explains that he can't ever go under again. 

"So you came here to get an extractor and a forger for just the one fee."

"I've got an extractor lined up," Arthur contradicts him sharply, but he goes on anyway

"Always better to have two-in-one if you can get it. The more minds in the dreamspace, the worse the instability. Look what happened last time."

It's true, about Yusuf bringing rain into the dreams, and Cobb bringing his toxic sub-conscious. But Eames isn't all that interested in the subtleties of extraction anymore. He's only stoking up the argument to earn himself a reaction. When Arthur leaves, he'll have to go back to chasing down the bills of lading for those walnut cabinets that went missing in Cadiz. 

He continues, "You'd better not be making up for it with more sedative. You should know better."

Arthur dumps the sample swatches back on the desk with a heavy thump. "I've got in under control, okay. Ross is extracting. I just need you to forge. Is that too much to ask?"

The grin Eames gives him is hardly fake at all. "For you, Arthur? Of course not."

His desk phone rings. "Good news," Nicola says. "They'll be on my doorstep by mid-afternoon. The courier's booked for four."

He covers the receiver with his hand, miming regret. "This'll be a while." He glances expectantly at the door. "Have to take a raincheck."

Arthur looks oddly relieved as he pulls a card from his breast pocket and writes on it. "Meet me tonight. Seven. I'll bring you up to speed."

The mezzanine bar of the St Regis, he reads as he hangs up a few moments later. All brass and reflective surfaces. The soulless, conventional side of Arthur he finds so hard to reconcile with the glimpses of thrill-seeker.

As he pulls up the last email about those bills of lading, he's already looking forward to it. For a couple of hours, it will be like old times, as he teases the details of the job out of Arthur and points out improvements for the sole purpose of baiting him. For one evening, he'll abuse the privilege of being the centre of Arthur's attention, make Arthur jump through a few hoops for him, before he picks the moment to tell the truth and bring their relationship to an abrupt and permanent end. About that part, he has no illusions. Arthur's never had much time for him as a professional colleague. Without the ability to dream, he will be as good as invisible to Arthur’s unsentimental eyes. Perpetually at work as he moves lightly from one job to the next, Arthur doesn’t seem the sort to hang onto anything apart from what’s essential to the purposes at hand. 

Over the years of their acquaintance, he’s suffered enough at Arthur’s hands. He deserves a couple of drinks to indulge himself before he comes clean.

**

Four drinks in, and Eames is telling the story of how he convinced a heritage fabric supplier to make him its exclusive Middle East representative by arranging a good price on an ancient silver Bentley that had supposedly been owned by a senior member of the British royal family. 

“You know what clinched it? I got a mate to swing the blunt end of a pick at the back door a few times. Amazing the damage an angry polo pony can do after a bad day on the field.”

Arthur puts a peanut in his mouth, but he's smiling around it. Eames doesn't care anymore. It's faintly salacious, meeting Arthur in a bar. Something they've never done before. It's been a hell of a day, too. His first call finally tracked those cabinets down to a dockside warehouse in Portsmouth, and not five minutes after that, the phone rang with an invitation to an exhibition opening full of well-connected customers. 

Arthur licks salt off his finger then his thumb. The ice in his glass seems to sparkle with potential as he swirls it.

It’s nothing Eames hasn’t seen before though, this glimpse of playful interest. Arthur’s like that. Magnetically attracted to that peculiar combination of intellect, recklessness and nimble imagination that draws people into dreamshare and allows them to thrive. Eames has watched him over the years – watched him flirt with chemists and architects, psychologists and engineers, watched him reel them in smile by dimpled smile, and then forget them in favour of the next brilliant mind that plugged in a line. Sometimes his interest wanes early, before they have a chance to sleep together, when something in the dreamscape exposes an unacceptable flaw; other times the attraction is a little more lasting, though never long enough to complicate a second job.

Eames had got about twenty minutes into their acquaintance – twenty minutes of instant physical appreciation and mildly saucy small talk about precision firearms, followed by a dazzling display of high-level mathematics as Arthur dashed off dosage calculations on the back of a groceries receipt, the adroit prick of the needle, and a test run in which Eames wielded every trick in his repertoire in a courtship that felt like a pretty sure thing – before Arthur dismissed a perfect forge of their client with a clinical nod and glanced at his watch as the timer ran down. Back up topside, the cautious warmth between them had vanished for good, replaced by a prickly distance that would become a permanent part of their working relationship.

Arthur is in love with extraction, Eames has had years now to learn. He never falls for people, really, and certainly not for Eames. It has been – if he really counts, it’s been nearly six years of casual invitations neatly rebuffed, of wasted strategies, a Cartier watch here, an unfastened button there, an extra dash of insubordination when Arthur’s attentions to the latest team member turned that persistent low-key hunger into a palpable spasm of pain, all culminating in that last job in Berlin, Mal’s last great build, where everything had come together like a dream and Eames had spent an absurd amount of money on a hotel room that Arthur had curtly refused to come back to. 

If it were ever going to happen between them, there have been all too many opportunities. But Eames has built his career on making impossible things come to pass, and he's on his fifth drink, and Arthur is here in Doha, smiling across the rim of his glass and barely talking about his new job at all.

When he says, "There's a thirty year old bottle of cognac up in my room," Eames isn't even surprised. It seems perfectly natural to sketch an acquiescent flourish with his empty hand and reply, "Delightful in every way. Let's go then."

** 

This is for Eames's good as much as his own, Arthur tells himself as he surveys the slumped, unconscious body on the bed. Far better for him to face Arthur's relatively benign interrogation than what Proclus will do to him if word gets out that he's been spilling Saito's handsomely paid secrets. 

All it took was a few sips of adulterated brandy. Eames was already loose when they reached his room, slouching on the end of the bed in a placid way Arthur was unused to. On Eames, a slouch was usually a cover for a trap about to be sprung. The more louche he seemed, the riskier it was to turn your back on him. 

And yet here they are, no sprung trap, no defences at all. Eames's face looks grave and vulnerable. With his smirking mouth gone slack, his shifting eyes closed, his stillness highlights the fine lines etched onto his skin, shadows of vanished emotions. He's seen Eames out cold dozens of times on one job or another, but never like this. Never put there against his will.

He always knew this task would be distasteful. Best thing he can do now, is make it quick. He gets the PASIV out from where he's chained it into the cupboard, slots two fresh vials into place, and plunges them under.

**

When Arthur steps in from the reception room into the bedroom of the compact dream level, Eames is exactly where he should be. 

"You're awake," Arthur remarks, closing the door. "Take your time. We're not meeting until eleven. Ross's flight got diverted via Houston."

What shows of Eames above the sheets is naked. Arthur's leather jacket is thrown over the chair, and his hair is wet as if recently showered. Outside the window is a long stretch of white beach, which Arthur modelled perfectly on the view from a Caymans hotel. It's one-dimensional, though. As flat as a theatre back-drop. Neither of them will be leaving this room. On a solo job like this, Arthur has to get his information quick and clean, because once the projections start swarming, there's no-one to help him hold them off. 

"How's the jetlag?" he asks, retrieving his satchel from under the table and removing a sheaf of papers. He puts a bit of heat in his voice, "We worked most of it off last night, I hope."

Eames makes a vague circular gesture, frowning deeply. "Still a bit—"

Arthur glances at his watch, puts a hint of a curl in his mouth. "Well, we've got three hours to kill."

If Eames or Cobb had planned this job, they would have called his methods coarse. Dull. Too obvious to succeed. Arthur prefers to call his strategy _direct_. He needs Eames to let his guard down, and what better way to do it than an assumption of sexual intimacy? He's not stupid, he knows Eames thinks of him that way. All he's done is give flesh to an old fantasy.

"Hey," Arthur says, fishing in his trouser pocket. "I saved this for you."

He hands over a Canadian hundred dollar bill, perfectly forged down to the security numbers in the maple leaf window, except that the denomination reads $102. As if they were not only lovers, but the kind of lovers who thought of each other when they were apart, and watched out for little kindnesses to store up. "It looked like a good piece to me. If you like it, I can put you in touch with the guy who did the work. He's a chemist, background in industrial plastics. Works on Georgiou’s teams sometimes."

He watches Eames rub the transparent window with the pad of his thumb, lost in the sort of absent-minded appreciation Arthur could see himself lavishing on a Bucherer watch or a perfectly balanced railway bridge. He'd been right to put all those hours into the banknote. Eames is tactile. By convincing his fingertips, Arthur has won his trust.

There's a twitch of distant motion on the beach outside. 

"We need to bump up security for this job," Arthur tells him briskly. "It has to be a hundred percent watertight this time. Word got back to me that someone on the Fischer job talked. Surprises me. Did you know anything about that?"

Eames looks over distractedly from where he's holding the banknote up to the light. "Talked to who?"

Arthur just shrugs. "That part was never specific."

Eames grabs a pair of pants off the floor and starts pulling them on. Taking the opportunity, Arthur checks the safe in the wardrobe and finds it empty. He pushes it half-closed, ready to wait. He built this three-room level meticulously. The walls are solid masonry, the foundations a single solid concrete pour, and every square inch in the ceiling is plugged up with insulation. There is only one secure place to hide a guilty thought in.

It gives Arthur a start to find Eames standing at the bathroom mirror, but he’s combing his hair and not testing to see if he can forge. He runs the tap and splashes his face, a couple of drops sliding down his bare chest. For a second, Arthur’s chest constricts with the guilt of spying on a personal ritual he’s never seen topside before.

But he says, “I looked into everyone's financials. Only two of the team were short of cash. Yusuf checks out. What about you, Eames? What have you been doing since the job wrapped?"

Eames frowns at his reflection. “Working.”

“And before that?”

He turns. “Before that, Arthur, I was putting myself back together after the job before that – which, you might remember, turned out to be a whole lot more than I signed on for.”

“All right,” Arthur is saying when something unprecedented happens. 

The mirror behind Eames goes dark, and suddenly resolves itself into an image. Arthur in the driver’s seat, neck straining to see behind him as he desperately reverses out of the line of fire. It’s a scene he knows from a different angle, but this is Eames’s perspective, crouched low in the back seat. Its slow frames track all the furious expressions on Arthur’s face as he slams his way through deadly obstacles. There’s a high pitched crack as a bullet breaks the driver’s side window, on a trajectory that passes a half-inch from Arthur’s jaw, and thuds into a target that he knows without turning will be Saito’s ribcage. A split second later, he sees himself turn back to check the front view, putting his face across the invisible path of the bullet. 

”You might check your friend Dominic Cobb,” Eames is saying. “A man who’s got a funny idea of loyalty – and that’s another thing I hope you’ve taken note of if you’re thinking of working with him again.” 

“He came up clean this time. What were you doing back in London, Eames? Before you set up in Doha?”

Eames hooks a towel off the wall to wipe his face and hands with, but behind him the mirror is projecting broken, disjointed memories. There’s a bar, airport bar judging by the hard-wearing tabletops, and Eames's hand holding a double scotch. Its surface is trembling terribly. When the view swings up, there’s a vulture perched on the back of the opposite chair, talons scoring the plastic, the angle of the head profiling the meathook curve of its beak. Its black eyed gaze is unwavering as it launches forward with its broad wings open and then the scene goes hazy. 

"What if Saito's doing worse than we thought?" Eames chucks the towel and bypasses the question. "Eighty years in limbo could have shredded his brain like a cheese grater. And we already know he’s someone who dives in over his head. Have you looked into him?”

There’s the patchy lighting of a nightclub, Eames's face looking haggard under fluorescent light in a bathroom mirror as the cubicle door behind him swings open and a suit of armour walks through it, broadsword raised and coming towards him.

Arthur pushes him one more time, to be sure. "You think Saito, do you? Or Cobb? You're saying point blank you haven't breathed a word?"

Something in Eames seems to darken then. "No, Arthur. I have not." The mirror blanks out. "You should be the one answering questions here. Like how much did you know about Cobb's little projection problem, and why didn't you do anything about it?"

Angry now, Eames's gaze darts around the room, as if asking how he could possibly have got to this scenario.

"You're right," Arthur makes himself say. "Take it easy. Just be ready for eleven."

In the bedroom, the safe is still empty when he bends down to check it. It's only as he's straightening up that he feels the jab of a fine point and checks his breast pocket to find a folded sheet of paper that wasn't there before. 

_Run,_ it says, in Eames's jerky, obtuse-angled script. _Stay alive. Don’t go back._

Arthur frowns at that. Then he leaves the bedroom, walks a few hundred feet into the misty, unbuilt dreamspace, and shoots himself in the head.

**

Arthur packs up the PASIV and slots the last of his belongings back into his bag, glad to draw a line under an all-round unpleasant experience. At least he can face Saito, if he ever needs to, and say that wherever the leak came from, it wasn’t anyone on his team. 

Most likely Eames won't be out long. With all the alcohol in his system, Arthur had to lower the sedative dose. When he wakes, he'll work out pretty quickly what happened – the unexplained passing out, the needle prick on his inner arm – and that's going to take care of the question of how to play the morning after, as well. The prudent course is not to work with Eames again, after this. Underneath his affably insubordinate surface lies a much darker core. Eames could hold onto a grudge for a long time, patiently waiting for revenge. He'll admit to a pang of regret at that thought, for the loss of a steady pair of hands. 

Picking up the hotel swipe from the table by the door, he pauses. Eames is exactly where he collapsed last night: still fully clothed, his feet on the floor and his body slumped back on the bed, baring his thick neck in an uncharacteristic display of vulnerability. He hasn't moved as he should if the sedative were giving way to natural sleep. Arthur's danger instincts are going off, and he can't tell if they're warning him to stay or to flee. 

He leans against the closed door to think, and the change in posture pulls his mind back from its urgent pace. When he thinks about it, he's never seen Eames really lose his temper. If anything, he's got impressive control over the deadly strength he carries in those pro wrestler arms. It's only under extreme stress or betrayal that he so much as raises his voice. Eames’s weapon of choice is a smirk, or a coolly spoken word.

Yes, Arthur thinks. They can have a conversation about this after all, when Eames wakes up. 

But Eames doesn't wake up. 2am goes by. Arthur dozes through the depths of the night. When he prises open his eyelids at 6.30, Eames is still out cold. 

Arthur sits on the side of the bed and watches the rise and fall of his chest. It's unnaturally consistent. When Arthur pushes his shoulder, giving him a good shake, there's no change in rhythm. 

"Eames," he tries. "Talk to me. What's going on down there?"

He ventures an all-out slap, peels up an eyelid to reveal motionless whites. He calls Eames's cell phone, in case the aural stimulus can reach down to greater sub-conscious depths. The stillness of his face is getting creepy. It was only one level down. Eames will hardly have lived a lifetime in the seven hours he's been under. But it's alarming to have chemistry and biology shucking off their rules. 

There's no explanation for this. He checked the equipment and the dosages multiple times, as he would on any complicated job. Yet there's no ignoring the evidence before his eyes. It's getting on for eight o'clock, and Eames is out cold. 

Arthur waits until midday for the glitch to resolve itself. Then he unpacks the PASIV and goes back under. He sets the timer for two minutes, to limit the amount of pain or bewilderment he has to endure if something especially awful is going on down there. The thought makes him hurry, because whatever is awaiting him, Eames has endured days of it now. 

**

The first thing he’s aware of is heat, filling up his lungs, a dry sun beating down on his head mercilessly from a cloudless sky.

He’s on a high plateau, looking over a neatly cut, unpaved wide avenue flanked by forest on both sides. When he turns around he recoils slightly at the sight of two enormous carved beasts set into the broad pillar supports of a monumental doorway tiled in blue. Winged bulls with bearded humanoid faces and ornamental cylindrical hats, they evoke an ancient time he can’t quite place. 

From the shadowed passageway beyond the gate, three men emerge, carrying empty baskets, and walk off down the stairs. Their gleaming muscles and precise ring of black eyeliner suggest Hollywood golden age as much as any history Arthur can picture. But the stonework, he knows with the instinct of years of dream work, is no plaster set. The craftsmanship is detailed and sure, down to the geometric pattern of raised domes that texturise the beards and bodies of the creatures. It occurs to him that he’s never seen a build before that was all Eames’s own work.

The traffic thickens in the passageway. Men and women in white talk in clusters, in a murmured language that Arthur can’t make out. They are olive skinned, dark eyed, lean and handsome. The walls are decorated with friezes of battle scenery – horses and lions and – he looks closer. There's the distinctive black pentagons of a soccer ball, and behind it a set of netted goals. 

That takes the edge off his worry. It's a natural dream he's wandered into. Not some relic of an old job laced with booby traps and defensive paradoxes.

Just past the football frieze, he comes across a small doorway with an anomalous pair of French bulldogs supporting the pillars, and turns decisively through it. After a few moments of feeling his way through a dark corridor, he breaks out into noise and activity.

It's a covered market, in what looks to be a vast old warehouse, Victorian brown brick walls and trussed girders holding up a glass and steel roof. The stalls hold cloth-capped marmalade bottles, and amber pendants, and Disney themed smartphone covers. 

With the sinking feeling that Eames is going to be a hard mark to find, he pushes towards where the crowd is thickest and the aisles narrowest, and breaks through into a little yard with a small stage in the corner. On it, a magician in a top hat is closing a prim, twin-set clad lady into a box, watched by a crowd at plastic tables. 

And there in the front row, talking to a fire juggler and a bald man in head-to-toe tattoos, is –

"Arthur!" He raises one hand, as if he expected to be overlooked.

He's out of his seat, picking his way through the close-packed tables. "We weren't expecting you. Pull up a chair. There's mead over this way – kebabs behind you over there."

By the time they reach the table, its occupants have moved off, so Arthur takes one of the free chairs and accepts the mug that Eames pushes over. The taste is honey and rye, distinct flavours for a dream. He takes another sip.

The magician reconnects the severed lady with her torso back-to-front. Her expression turns severely displeased, but Eames doesn't appear to notice because Eames is no longer watching the performance. 

"There's chariot races later," he says, leaning across the table as if the background noise were loud enough to have to shout over. "I have to fill in. One of the drivers broke an arm at practice."

He says this with perfect candour, never mind the historical anachronisms, and even a kind of naked excitement. Candour is not what he’s used to on Eames, with his layers of artifice over cynicism over amused obstructionist malice. 

"Will you come and watch?" 

Frankly, this openness feels like a sophisticated sort of trap. 

"Sure. You know your way around a chariot, do you?"

Eames's smile slowly broadens. "I can ad lib most things, Arthur. You've seen my work."

There was that first job they worked together, where the dream level had called for unroped rock climbing. He'd assumed it was just one of those ad hoc skills that Eames had picked up in the military, and filed it away among his unpleasantly complicated reactions to the larger-than-life persona Eames had brought to that job. By the next time they worked together, he no longer had to fake indifference.

“When did you learn?” Arthur prompts. 

For a moment, Eames’s gaze loses focus. Then he stands up. “Let's get that kebab. I’m starving.” 

When the bald proprietor is frying up their pita, he has another go at triggering Eames’s awareness. “Reminds me of the lamb in Qatar,” he remarks. “You worked a job there once, didn’t you?”

“Was that yes or no to garlic sauce?” asks the proprietor suddenly over his shoulder. 

“No. Eames?” Arthur insists. “Doha?”

“Oh most likely, I worked a lot of places when I was in extraction. Now Libya, that’s a country worth the trouble.”

The spitted kebab meat revolves inside a gas-fueled burner. As Eames continues, Arthur touches the gas tank carefully with his thoughts, to thin out the steel around its mouth and make it as big as he can fit beneath the counter. The projections don't even murmur. 

“I saw a gladiator fight a panther in the arena at Leptis Magna once,“ Eames says.

Arthur draws his Glock. The tank explodes so huge and fierce that he doesn’t even feel it.

**

He's on a dirt road. Miles of yellow grassy plain on either side of it. Light morning sun falling through dry air. A breeze kicking up teasingly. A lone bird wheeling across the sky, coasting on invisible currents.

Since there's nothing else to do, Arthur keeps on walking. With each step, he turns the facts over in his head. There's no way Eames survived that explosion. When you die in a dream, you wake up. It's the most basic rule of extraction. And yet Eames's dream had collapsed, only to be replaced by this new one. Arthur allows himself an unsettled sort of curiosity. It's not panic, not with unexplored solutions assembling themselves in his mind. If time down here works like it should, he's got a half-hour left on the clock. That will be the first test.

He knows he's going the right way because he starts to pass roadside canteens with clusters of projections chatting and drinking. A family of giraffes walks unhurriedly across the road in front of him, towards a couple of broad-canopied acacia trees. Then he sees the house. 

It's so Tudor it could be a tourist hotel. Low ceilings. Gleaming whitewashed façade with dark wood window fittings and diagonal cross-beams. The top storey sills are fitted with pots of red geraniums. The lower storey is hidden by the garden. 

From the road, the cornfields around the house look harmlessly domestic, but it takes him ten minutes to twist and turn his way through their whimsical geometry.

"There you are," Eames says, breaking off from a conversation with two fellow workers. "You took your time."

He twists off one last green ear and throws it in the wicker basket on his back. There's a healthy sheen across his face, down to the angle of his shirt. With the golden sunlight touching up the pallor and deep muscle tension of stress he usually wears on a job, he looks suddenly, unexpectedly handsome, and Arthur remembers a thought he had years ago: what if things had been different?

"It wasn’t easy to get here," Arthur says sourly, because things aren't different, and he's running out of time with no new knowledge to show for it. 

“The short road is only a road,” says the woman in the red and black headscarf. “But the long road is a story unfolding.”

She smiles at him, shifting her heavy basket against her hip. She could be someone from Eames’s past, or an allegory for a place or an idea. 

“Arthur likes his stories to get directly to the point,” Eames says. “We’re a bit too digressive for his tastes here.”

Arthur is about to protest wearily against this mis-characterisation when Eames smiles at him, eyes crinkling in the light.

“Come on. Let me show you round.” 

The two women walk away along the row, singing low and patient, and picking as they go. Eames takes the other direction, towards the house, glancing over his shoulder to check that Arthur is following. He moves lightly up the slope, despite the basket slung over his back.

“You should have seen the place when we started. All dirt and brambles, vultures in the trees. It nearly broke my back, digging the irrigation channels. There’s diamonds in the ground here, wouldn’t you know? The size of your fist. We ended up with a pit full of broken shovels.” 

“How long have you been working on it?” Arthur ventures as they stop at the top of the hill. “Eames?”

But he’s no longer listening. Instead, he’s turned around to survey the slope they’ve just climbed. The tangled rows of cornfields have resolved themselves into perfect parallel lines. 

“That’s a lot of land,” Arthur says at last, when the silence has started to sound like expectation. 

“It’s good you’re here,” replies Eames, still surveying the fields. “Come on.”

The shelf of land that separates them from the house is bursting with trees. Eames leads them under the slanted, humid shade of banana palms.

“This is the real work,” he explains with a certainty of purpose Arthur remembers from the best of their shared projects. “This is what we were looking for all along. The key to the mind. Try one. Go on.”

He offers Arthur a banana peeled to mid length. The creamy flesh is shot through with threads of amber colour. There is nothing in Eames’s face that gives him pause, so he leans over and gingerly bites off the tip. The intense taste makes his mouth water as he chews. 

“It’s very-“ 

Arthur gets that far before it hits him. The warmth of summer sun sparkles down his arms and legs, pooling in his hands. He has to look at his cupped palm to check it’s not actually holding sunlight as solid as water. All the tension burns out of him. There’s a vigorous, delicious burn in the tendons of his wrists, in the muscles between his ribs. He feels newly made and fit enough to run forever. 

“You like them?” Eames asks, taking a generous bite of his own before he throws the fruit into the jungle of leathery dark green leaves. “They only grow here. Nowhere else.”

As they move on, the trees thin out to pointy stalks of pineapple, gnarled and thorny lemons, and then a drooping mango whose pendulous branches almost touch the surface of the clear pool beside it. 

“Wanderlust,” Eames tells him. “Guaranteed to make your feet itch with a single bite. Just think what you can do to a mark with that.” 

There’s a carpet of strawberries covering the ground. Arthur picks one, scrapes the seed coated flesh with his thumbnail to release the aroma, and inhales. 

“What’s this one?” he asks, and sinks his teeth into it. 

The flesh is sun-warmed and bursting with juice. It tastes like the essence of a whole punnet of strawberries had been extracted, concentrated, fermented and injected back into a single berry. A shiver of craving runs through him, and he has to look away, at the shimmering surface of the pond that ripples as he throws the fruit into it. He’s very aware of how close Eames is standing, of the faint magnetism across the distance between them. As always, Eames looks solid, indestructible, like he was made of marble underneath the skin. He finds himself sucking the last of the flavour off his lips, in search of more. 

“That one …” Eames trails off, very still, watching him. Normally Arthur knows how to throw up a technical question between them, or a piece of outstanding work, to break this kind of moment and keep Eames at bay, but just now he can’t make himself mind. It’s Eames who tucks his hands in his pockets. “That one’s best sampled in moderation for now, I’d say.”

There are golden apples after that, for wisdom. Arthur picks one, buffs it carefully on his shirt, and offers it to Eames in the hope that it might trigger some level of awareness. Eames bites into it with a conspicuous crunch and surveys the orchard around him, like a character from some Greek myth, whose sole purpose was the guardianship of a magical treasure.

“This would have come in handy on the Litvinov job,” Arthur observes. 

“For the extractor, perhaps,” Eames replies distractedly, still looking at the trees. “If the mark was any sharper, he’d have cut himself.”

Then he moves off, leading Arthur towards a huge arched trellis that gives onto a garden of low manicured hedges and then the house. The trellis hangs thick with purple grapes. They put Arthur in mind of the brandy they had drunk only hours back, topside. In a natural dream, time doesn’t run to any sort of scale, but he thinks there can’t be much left on the timer, and he’s not had any hint of what’s holding Eames in this dream. 

“What happens if you leave?”

“Are you bored, Arthur? Already?”

“Hypothetically. What happens?”

“Who’d take care of all of this then? It’s more work than you’d think. Seems a shame to let it all crumble away into nothing.”

“I could take you some place better.”

Eames swipes his hand over his mouth, looks away. There’s a critical sharpness in his gaze now, as if the little gaps and elisions of a dreamed landscape were starting to catch his eye. The joyful glimmer has vanished, replaced by mistrust and doubt.

“Eames-“

“Smoke.”

Arthur glances over his shoulder to see great rolling clouds of it, as if those acres of cornfields had been set ablaze.

“This way.” Eames sets off at a run towards the house. 

By the time they reach it, the whole garden is one big wall of flame. Embers drift in the door as it slams behind them. 

“Is there a way out?” Arthur asks. Dying by fire is one of the worst, and he’s not even sure how dying works for Eames down here.

With a grim nod, Eames follows the low-ceilinged corridor across the length of the house, ignoring the darkened rooms on either side, and throws open the front door.

They step out onto dusty earth held down by the occasional paltry tuft of grass. The air is dry in the mouth, but free from smoke. There is a row of grey buildings facing them, built from sagging timbers with the life stripped out of them by years of remorseless sun. Apart from the brilliant blue sky, the only colour is a scrap of half-hearted peeling red paint on a doorway or window sash, or dark green mould on the rim of a horse trough.

The door that shuts behind them is set in a one-room shack with boarded up windows. The garden and the Tudor house are gone. 

“Where are we?” Arthur asks, although he can guess. It’s a scene from a Western movie, only as dreamed by someone who knows what the world really feels and smells like when there is no sewerage or running water and the nearest port is two weeks’ hard ride away. The metal fittings are layered with rust, their original gleam a distant memory. The warp of bleached wood panels has created gaps, so that the interiors will be riddled with dust and draughts. Broken axles and barrel panels lie by the side of the road, having no better ending place.

“I’ve been here,” Eames says uncertainly. 

A gunshot rings out, slicing through the dust in front of them. With a hand fisted in the back of Arthur’s shirt, Eames pulls him around the corner of the building, out of sight. Three more shots come, the last one bursting through the wood panel above Arthur’s head. 

“We can’t stay here,” Eames says just as the first hoofbeats start up. He snatches up a barrel lid. “Stay behind me. If we get to the saloon, there’ll be horses.” 

Another shot bursts through the decayed wood wall above their heads, showering them in splinters.

“No time to lose,” Eames breathes. 

They are running across the street into the shelter of the opposite row of houses, hugging the façades. Eames takes the outside, wielding the barrel lid like a battle shield. Arthur catches the glint of a weapon on a roof; another protruding from an unglazed window as they skirt around the back of a derelict house and clamber over charred, collapsed timbers. The shots shake old ash off the ruins all around them. A lot of bullets for a six shooter, Arthur thinks. Must be three gunmen, or more.

“How far to the saloon?” he asks – and, strangely, that’s the moment he starts to feel at home in Eames’s unpredictable dreamscape, as they slip into the economical sentences of confronting a hazard and their differences dissolve into instinctive teamwork.

“Up ahead. There’s a stretch of open ground to cross, we’ll need a plan.”

These are the times he’s been unquestionably glad to have Eames on the job. Under pressure, Eames drops the pettiness, the jibes, and becomes pure, competent professional. It’s always made him curious to know what it would take to draw out that side of him in the waking world, permanently. 

A giant of a man with a distinctive snake tattoo curling up the side of his neck steps out from a crooked back door to block their path. Eames barges into him, fists slamming into his jaw and then his gut. For an instant, Arthur is distracted by the dexterity of his quick-moving attack. Then he gets the presence of mind to pick up the remains of a thick wooden bucket and bring it down as hard as he can across the back of the man’s head. It’s not a killing blow, but enough to give Eames the chance to finish him off. 

Eames draws a pistol from the slumped man’s belt and tucks it into his waistband. Around the corner of the house looms a wide space where three roads meet. In the opposite junction is the saloon. 

“Go,” Eames tells him. “I’ll cover you.”

It’s only a dream, and the clock can’t have more than a minute left on it. Arthur runs.

The bullets glance off the baked earth, but answering shots ring out from Eames behind him. From the corner of his eye, he sees a figure on a rooftop crumple and fall. Then he’s inside the shadowy saloon, and a few moments later Eames bursts through the swinging doors and leans, panting, against the bar beside him. A couple of old-timers at the corner table take their hands off their holsters and go back to their cards.

“Okay?”

Eames nods, then reaches out to touch a wet patch on Arthur’s arm. The shot hadn’t even registered. A barmaid with wearily faded red hair passes Eames a cloth, and he ties it around the wound. He lets Eames turn him around to check the back of him. Apparently he passes. 

“Whisky thanks,” Arthur tells the barmaid. “No water. Eames--”

“No time for that. This way.” 

A bullet whistles through the window and the barmaid spins heavily and goes down.

In the yard out the back of the bar is a single bony horse, and a hot air balloon with a patched together cowhide canopy. It’s a testament to the contagious urgency of Eames’s dream that they have thrown themselves into the basket before he has time to dwell on the historical and technological anomalies. Yet when Eames cuts them free of the sandbags, up they rise, speedy but smooth. Eames steadies his gun on his forearm and picks off three more assailants with his self-replenishing six shooter before they sail out of range. 

“How’s that arm?” Eames asks, and busies himself refastening the rag on Arthur’s sleeve. The wound starts to throb mightily when the pressure is released.

A wisp of thin cloud passes behind Eames’s shoulder, then another. When Arthur looks over the edge, the earth is so far below them that he can see the line of snow-capped mountains in the west, and green coast beyond that. In a matter of moments, they have cleared the planet’s atmosphere and entered star-speckled black space.

Arthur leans against the side of the basket and breathes out a long, steadying breath. He ventures a small tweak of the dream and draws a hip flask from his pocket, takes a mouthful and passes it over. Eames drinks, watching the stars pass behind Arthur’s shoulder. The danger has stilled into tired lines across his brow. His pensive look is encouraging. 

“The timer’s set for ten minutes, Eames. It’s going to run out any moment now.” The balloon continues its steady course through the void. “We’re in my hotel room in Doha.”

Eames’s attention flicks to him. “The St Regis. Really, Arthur? It’s for the sort of traveller who wants to go all around the world without ever leaving LA.”

“Let’s talk once we’re out. I’ll run some blood work on you. There’s been some anomalies we need to look into.”

A faint smile warms his eyes. “Yes, Arthur. Let’s look into that. You and me.”

**

He blinks, and the next thing he sees is the hotel ceiling. He sits up, thumb pressed over the needle prick, and watches Eames’s blank face. But the dreamer doesn’t stir. His arm is limp as Arthur takes his drowsy pulse. His eyes are tracking behind his lids now, as if in natural sleep, but shake and pinch and shout as Arthur might try, there’s no rousing him. 

Arthur makes himself a coffee to settle his thoughts. There’s no doubt Eames was clean when they met up in the hotel last night – nothing in his system that shouldn’t be. His dreams were naturally creative, with none of the nightmarish hallucinations of a damaged mind, and far too structured to be some kind of limbo. There is nothing wrong with Eames. Nothing except the fact that he won’t wake up.

He calls down to reception and extends his reservation for two more nights. Leaning by the window, he gazes out at the flat sea that glitters fiercely as far as he can see, but it’s impossible not to remember that his two-minute break is costing Eames almost an hour down there. Shoes kicked off, he sits at the hotel desk and opens up his archive of literature and research, running over it again and again for some hint he must have missed. You die in the dream, you wake up. What can possibly have happened to overturn the most fundamental rule in the book? 

An hour later, the words are starting to swim before his eyes. His mind is growing fuzzy. In his mouth is the taste of strawberries, still lingering from the dream. He wipes his lips but it persists.

“I’ve got a dreamer who won’t wake up,” he says without preamble the moment Cobb picks up the phone. 

“Jesus, Arthur.” 

If they haven’t talked since the Fischer job, Cobb has only himself to blame for that. Arthur doesn’t have time to be delicate with his wounded pride today. “Have you seen that before?”

“Three levels is too far. If there’s one lesson we learned--”

“It isn’t limbo. I’ve been down to look. It’s a natural dream.”

He can practically hear Cobb fighting not to take an interest.

“Your mark?”

“No. One of us. The wires have been out of him for eighteen hours. I blew him to pieces and he just dropped into a new level.”

The silence lasts too long. “Cobb? How do I wake him up?” 

“The chemistry must be off.”

Arthur crumples a piece of hotel stationery in his hand. “It’s not the mix. I made it myself.” He doesn’t have time for subtlety, and Cobb was always the one who delighted in psychological manipulation anyway. “What did you try? When you went down there. What worked?”

Arthur can hear a miked voice in the background – an airport, or a conference. 

“Look,” Cobb says, in that weary voice he uses on marks that says all the will to dissemble has been ground out of him, leaving him nothing but hard truths to tell. “People dream for a reason. We’ve messed around with them so long we’ve forgotten how powerful they are. If a dreamer doesn’t want to wake up, then pulling them out is a kind of murder.” The background voice comes again. “I’ve got to go, Arthur.”

The line goes dead. 

After that, Arthur works down his mental list of dreamshare contacts, one by one. Maddox has got nothing. Yusuf doesn’t answer. Chen and Hawk are incommunicado for a job. His CIA handler lets him trade a promise of future work for a name at Army Research, and from her he gets an unspecifically guilty silence and a hint that the most useful course of action is contacting next of kin.

The first lights are coming on by the time he hangs up his phone and plugs it in to charge. 

“Well, buddy,” he says. “It’s down to you and me then.” 

The hum of the air conditioning answers him. 

Eames’s head rolls slightly towards him when he sits on the bed. His face is looking worn now, oil gathering down the sides of his nose, dry cracks in his lips. Strange to think Arthur’s never looked at him so closely during their waking hours. Eames is always observing, always calculating, his thoughts never still. If Arthur’s attention has been on him, he’s been reporting on a task or outlining a plan, his mind and his face in motion, his interjections keeping Arthur on his toes. Only once, in that hotel level where gravity betrayed them, can he really remember seeing Eames at rest. Then as now, he’d had the impression of seeing something private and vulnerable.

He breathes out hard as he lies back on the bed. Hours with little rest are starting to tell. He turns his head to look at the unconscious man beside him. Does Eames not want to wake up? The thought is ridiculous. Eames has a gift for almost anything he turns his hand to. He’ll never be short of options. The whole idea is absurd. From the get-go, he’s invested only the most miserly portion of his interest in dreamshare, never committing and at times barely appearing to take the industry seriously. He walks away when a job doesn’t suit him. He cheerfully burns bridges and never comes looking for work of his own accord. Arthur doesn’t have the radar for psychological vulnerabilities of someone like Cobb, but he feels this as an absolute certainty. Eames is not the sort to hide away in a dream.

He sits up at the buzz of his phone. 

“Yes?”

“You better do the talking,” says Yusuf. “And you’d better have something important to say since you’ve called me seven times.”

Yusuf asks the same questions Cobb had, and a few more.

“You excluded the possibility of trauma to the cranium? But even so, if there was physical damage to the brain, it’s unlikely the dreams would be intelligible the way you describe. No. I’ve not seen anything like it. Do let me know your solution. If you find one.”

A floor full of lights goes on in the building next door. That’s almost one day.

“Yusuf,” he says, voice flat with fatigue. “It’s Eames.”

The silence jostles with conclusions and judgments. Eventually, Yusuf says, “Give me a minute then. I’ll make some calls.”

During the wait, Arthur eats a chocolate bar and a packet of crisps and pours himself a vodka, which he sips once and discards. He knows how to maintain his optimism until every last route to success has been tried and abandoned. 

He manages to lever Eames’s body up enough to get at the wallet in his back pocket. It’s obviously illicitly acquired – it’s full of the scraps of someone else’s life. A restaurant in Frankfurt. Golf clubs. Dry cleaning in Brussels. A Dior fragrance set in Dubai. In among the stolen papers, there’s an international driver’s licence and an Amex card for Frederick John Slattery, but nothing more revealing. No indication of who he should call if their options run out. 

“He didn’t say anything to you?” Yusuf asks straight off. “Before he went under?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Arthur hears himself stiffly say.

There’s a frustrated hiss of breath down the line. “Idiot. Wretched, wretched idiot.” 

“What’s going on? Yusuf?” 

“Your forger has been experiencing severe anomalies in his sleep patterns for some time. After he finished a job, he’d sleep for days. When he first came to Mombasa, I was giving him a horse-sized dose of amphetamines just so he could make it through the day. He got better, though. We put it down to a badly timed virus, and when Dominic Cobb arrived with his job offer, he thought he could take it on.”

“You didn’t try to talk him out of it?”

“I know when I’m wasting my breath. He got through it – you saw that. It was only afterwards. We lost touch, after – well, you know. But my ex-wife has a practice in London. She said he was in pretty poor shape by the time he made it back from LA. Blackouts, hallucinations. She ran some tests on him. His melatonin levels were off the scale, even during the day.”

“A bit of mixed up brain chemistry is hardly an event, not in this industry. How do we correct for excessive melatonin?”

“I suppose you could work on the pineal gland,” Yusuf muses, “if it weren’t located right in the middle of the working brain. Any case, it wasn’t just one thing. His body was throwing up spikes in glycine and gamma-aminobutyric acid too. All the neurotransmitters associated with sleep. What you have, Arthur, is a damaged brain stem that’s been severed from its circadian cycle and is over-compensating.” 

“So I need a stronger kick, is what you’re saying.”

“That would be pointless. His neurons will be synchronic. Overwhelmed with redundant messages. Even if sensations like touch and sound are reaching the primary sensory cortex, the nerve pathways that connect to response centres in the brain are incapable of transmitting.”

“What about adrenalin, then. If he’s in a deep sleep. We used that on--”

“What he’s in, Arthur, is a persistent vegetative state. Which he was told would almost certainly happen if he hooked himself up to a PASIV again. So what I can’t understand is why he would do that.”

“No.” Arthur hears the strain in his own voice. “That can’t be right. There’s nothing about this in the literature. I’ve been … Jesus, I’m almost fifty years old if you count dream time. I should have burned out every neuron in my skull by now. But here I am, because the brain is resilient. We wake up.”

The evidence of his long experience is so convincing that a shiver goes up his spine when Yusuf begins to speak.

“Not always. I had a customer who was one of the first phase test subjects. We’re talking over three years of weekly use. Then one day, he swerves off the road trying to avoid a stegosaurus he thought he saw. The next day, he sleeps for eighteen hours. I turned him away from my shop, when I saw the test results. But he broke in one night when I was away at a conference and put himself under.”

Arthur hunches over the desk, rests his forehead on the heel of his hand. “And?”

“And his body is in a clinic somewhere in Wyoming, hooked up to a machine. His family’s religious. God hasn’t told them what to do yet.”

A long time must pass.

“Arthur?” Yusuf asks with an edge of urgency.

Arthur hangs up the phone. He calls that contact at Army Research again, armed with this new information. This time her silence tells him everything he doesn’t want to know.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arthur tries to undo the damage he's done, but there's no more dangerous place than a forger's subconsicous.

Eames’s chest is still rising and falling. Arthur can feel the strength of it under his palm. The immediate solidity of him is persuasive. It’s hard to believe that the link between body and mind has been severed.

His thoughts extend themselves mercilessly to conclusions. 

_“Santé,_ I suppose,” was the last, inane thing that Eames had said to him. The last thing, it turns out, that Eames will ever say. The sense of loss comes as swift as a bullet. For the wasting of a profound and unique talent, at first, and then, less certainly, for the spark of possibility between them, that never seemed to be worth the complications. 

“You could have said something.” Eames’s chest continues its slow rhythm. “Instead of dropping off the grid like that.”

He sets himself to work hauling blankets from the cupboard and layering pillows on top. Eames is harder to budge than he would have expected – all that bulk much heavier than it looks when Eames is draping himself indolently over a chair or dropping two storeys off a roof. When Arthur’s got him on the edge of the bed, all it takes is one hard jerk and he’s falling. 

It’s a kick as good as any Arthur’s given topside before. It does nothing.

Eames hits the makeshift cushions with a brutal thud, but his eyes remain closed. Arthur calls him a few choice names, then goes to his case for a new dose of somnacin.

“Your comatose marine,” he asks, mixing with the phone wedged against his shoulder, “how long has he been under?”

Yusuf’s irritated sigh bleeds into the answer, “Eleven months. No change in state, Arthur. It’s not going to wear off.”

“But his physical health is what you’d expect? Apart from the inevitable muscle wastage and circulatory deterioration.”

“He’s holding up okay for a body fed by a drip.”

“And he could continue—“

“No – no, wait a second. That’s not what he’d want. He isn’t—”

“Don’t bother speculating. I can find that out myself.”

He completes the mix and swirls it in the vial.

After a moment, Yusuf surmises, “You’re going back under.”

“Obviously.”

There’s a longer silence this time. “Listen, Arthur. Don’t forget who you’re dealing with. He manipulates dream physics in a way we thought was impossible, and it’s one hundred percent instinct. In his own dream, he could do anything. And there are plenty of paths down to Limbo.”

“Sure. I’ll watch out.”

This time the irritated sigh is unmistakable. “Send someone else down. You must have noticed – you know how he feels about you. It’s not wise for you to be the one who tells him.”

For a moment, Arthur’s attention locks on the cloudy contents of the vial. In an industry where the adventurous and talented are constantly thrown into the close-knit bonds of teamwork, every job is rife with levels of attraction, professional respect and idle desire all mixed up together. Eames is a persuader by trade. There was never any reason to think Arthur was unique. 

“I’m all there is,” Arthur tells him bitterly. “And don’t feel too sorry for me. I’m the one who put him under.”

He signs off and slots the vial into place.

**

He’s in a red-brick alleyway. The sky is a uniform grey, and it’s wet underfoot. The scraps of rubbish – beer cans, chocolate wrappers – indicate a time a little way from the present. 

He follows the alley downhill, to where three concrete stairs lead onto a brownish canal. A flicker of colour draws him upstream, and there in the shadow of a bridge is a groups of boys seated on ledges and milk crates, around a fire sparking in what looks like an old hub cap. A cardboard box with its newly cut white factory tape sits open – inside are portable CD players, two of them ripped from their plastic wrappers and discarded. A second box, now half empty of cigarette cartons, sits beside it. 

Eames is both with them and apart – wearing an almost identical black and white polyester windbreaker on a decade older frame. He idly picks up a newspaper and throws it on the fire. There’s a half-hearted flicker of flame. 

“Saw a lorry pulled up at the warehouse,” says the gaunt faced boy with the black hair cut low across his brows. “We’ll go down after. Pick up some new gear.”

One of the others grunts. Eames kicks at the edge of the hub cap and makes the flame shiver. The irritable gesture tells Arthur what the others don’t seem to have grasped, that when they go down to the warehouse later, Eames won’t be there. 

Eames’s attention snaps up the moment he steps forward.

“What you want?” the lorry boy says in a tone that makes Eames get up to stand between them. 

“All right, settle down.” It’s the faintly smirking tone that Arthur knows from the present, and not the adolescent bluster he was afraid of. “Come on over, Arthur. Meet the crew.”

Instead, the crew draws back sullenly, as Eames changes tack to reach into the bigger box.

“You’ll like this one. Chinese military tech.”

In Arthur’s hands the portable CD player is transformed. Eight tentacles of headphones dangle from its silver saucer body, ear buds like suckers ready to latch onto the skull, and in the centre of the turntable is a ring of black spikes. 

“It eavesdrops on your thoughts. Want to try it?” Eames grins invitingly. 

It would be helpful to know what’s going on in Eames’s head, so he reaches out for it. “Sure. You first.”

“Take one of these.” Ignoring him, Eames passes another one over, this time a matte combat grey. “It throws up a forcefield that can shield you from a close quarters grenade blast, or a missile up to ten metres off. MI6 will never miss them.”

There’s a whole box full of these things, and if he hadn’t already been aware of it, these dream levels have given him a vivid illustration of just how deep Eames’s creativity goes. He catches keen, distracted phrases … helicopter … data theft … weather manipulation … before he touches Eames’s arm.

“Where are we?”

Eames shrugs him off. “The canal.”

“I can see that for myself. What are we doing here?”

A vicious metallic scrape jags his attention. The ginger kid with the broad shoulders is slashing a pocket knife against the mortar of the canal wall. His gaze is fixed on Arthur.

“Come on.” Eames turns abruptly, dragging Arthur with him. “The good bit’s down here. I’ll show you.”

Before Arthur can ask, they’ve rounded the bend, and there up ahead is a gondola. It’s pure, provoking, gaudy baroque with three-foot-high gilded wings at the stern, and a dragon’s head prow. Stripping off his jacket, Eames steps in, and Arthur follows, the scrape of the blade still menacing from behind them.

The current carries them far more quickly than a man-made watercourse ought to be able to, helped along by Eames’s hard work on the oar. His khaki t-shirt clings to the solid muscle beneath. Their working history has taught Arthur the discipline to look at Eames’s body with a strategist’s eye for capacity, thinking of busted-down doors or cabinets to be shifted, shutting down any distracting whiff of the erotic, but as the red-brick walls start to give way to greenery along the riverbank, he lets himself indulge in a different perspective. In a sense, the dream body is the only body Eames has got now. A slick of sweat trickles down from behind his earlobe. Eames has always been a solid presence on teams full of dreamers. His thinking is concrete, practical, with firm roots in flesh. It’s the lovers of theory – like Cobb, like Ariadne – who are only half-present to start with, who have the potential to drift off and lose themselves in a nebula of possibility. Moored in reality, with the butt of a pistol in hand or a knife between his teeth, Eames has always been an anchor for a less substantial team. It’s practically impossible to believe that this changeable dream body, bending into stroke after slow stroke, is the last one he will inhabit. 

He fights off a sudden stab of memory from that first job, in Brazil, when Eames was still more mystery than fact, before he’d learned to corral those restless, mutinous tendencies with routines and cool rebuffs. Eames settling across the saddle of a motorbike. Denim clad thighs easing around its glossy black body, easy curl of his hips as he found his seat, and turned back to Arthur. For a second, the afternoon sun lit his eyes clear and inviting before the shades went over them and he sped off in a growl of diesel power. 

The brown canal water stretches out as big as an ocean around them. Eames squints into a shaft of sunlight. 

“Your friends back there,” Arthur prompts gently. “How long have you known them?”

Eames turns his face out of the light with an irritable shrug. “Since forever. We were kids together.”

The water’s surface trembles. Arthur leans forward. “And how many years is that? Eames? How long since you were kids together?”

A frogman bobs out of the water, hooks his arms over the side of the gondola, and starts to haul himself in. A rifle is strapped across his back and his face remains invisible through his mask. With a single well-aimed kick, Eames sends him splashing back, but before the boat has even righted itself, two more invaders are scrambling up by Arthur’s side. A red laser sight skates over the prow by Arthur’s head. 

“Eames.” But Eames has already dropped the oar and quickly disposes of them both. 

“Here.” Of course he pulls out the portable forcefield from an improbably capacious pocket. When he hits the activation switch, an arc of faintly luminous blue springs up. The laser sight flits across it like glass and Arthur knows it’s going to hold against anything if he needs it to.

“Thanks.”

Eames is scanning the horizon for lurking threats. The water is almost completely opaque: anything could be under there, anything within the bounds of Eames’s improbably capacious imagination. Arthur struggles to find the right way to move them on, and remembers how Cobb was always blindingly confident about reducing a man’s psychology to a series of aphorisms, always certain of where he was heading, never more certain than when he was wrong. 

“Where are we headed?” he tries, and ducks away from the ping of a bullet deflecting off his shield. “You’ve got unfinished business in Qatar. Haven’t you?” 

A few dozen yards away, a submarine breaks the surface, water cascading off its bridge.

“We can’t wait around here,” Eames says, half to himself, and opens a rear panel of the gondola like a cupboard to produce an outboard motor that folds out and over the stern. It starts with a roar. From under the back seat comes a neat black Glock. “Cover me while I get us out of here.”

The shore comes into view again as they speed off downriver, leaving the sub behind them. Arthur has to pick off a couple of snipers hidden among the undergrowth. There’s no end to the threats Eames’s sub-conscious is capable of dreaming up. 

“Can you get us somewhere safe?” he asks between shots. “We need to stop running and make a plan.”

Up ahead, the canal narrows down. The left bank is dark green jungle, caimans lazing on the shallows. On the right bank lies a town, a poorly planned jumble of buildings separated by narrow streets. It’s got a remote, Amazonian feel to it, Arthur thinks as they pull into one of the jetties. The rough lawlessness of a frontier town, a throb of restless energy under tropical lassitude. 

The streets are packed with projections as they push their way through the crowd. He lets Eames lead the way, and sure enough they’ve barely reached the square at the centre of the town when Eames turns a corner, shoulders open an ancient set of church doors and descends the staircase that leads down to the crypt. 

At the bottom of the stairs is a red beaded curtain. It jingles behind them as they step into another place and time.

Arthur pauses in the low, gold tinted light. This isn’t an old memory or another piece of whimsy out of Eames’s imagination. The art deco curves of dark wood; the downlights on the underside of the bar. This is somewhere they’ve been together. A glance at the red banquette booths to the right locks it in place. That job in Berlin, with the rendezvous in Kreuzberg after. Mal’s triumphant, huge-scale build, that had turned out to be the last and greatest of her creations. The one and only time he’d tugged on the tenuous bonds of joint criminal enterprise and thought – yes – there could be a team there, underneath it all. 

The bar, like the memory it’s drawn from, is imperfect. Some corners are barely more than planes of shape cast in shadows. The faces are hazy, yet the music is distinct. And the banquette under the Beardsley print, where he and Eames had sat companionably for hours as success and frothy wheat beer leached the last animosity out of them, is the most heavily adorned with detail.

The slow, silky ascent of a clarinet bathes the room in mellow sound. The space is at once elegant and intimate. Its brass fittings infuse the light with gold. This isn’t how Arthur remembers it, not at all. 

Eames is sitting at the same table, now, with a line of shot glasses in front of him. 

“Come and sit down,” he says, and rests his hands on the tabletop. “It’s been a long time between drinks.”

Eames looks up at him, still and steady. On the other side of the door, the pursuit has fallen silent.

When Arthur takes his seat, he can see that the shot glasses are not as simple as they appeared. They are tinged faintly with a misty grey, a slowly diffusing drop of livid red, or threads of spring green. The last one has a mangled bullet in it. But Arthur can’t afford to be curious. There’s a destination he has to guide them to, and Eames’s busy sub-conscious might not give him another chance.

“We had a drink here once before,” Arthur says. “Do you remember?” 

In Arthur’s memory, that night is tinged with bitter disappointment. 

It had taken him four shots of schnapps, at the start of the evening, to settle the euphoria of having stolen their way through layers of ex-KGB security and beguiled some of the most explosive militarisation invented, to break into the mind of Putin’s man in the EU and steal the location of the laundered fortune that the CIA hoped would launch his downfall. Five shots and he was swapping far-fetched rumours about genome manipulation research with Masha, their CIA liaison. Six shots and a pint of Weissbier later, he wound up slouched in the corner of the last booth, in a good-natured debate with Eames. One of those tangential, free-spirited conversations that spiralled through hours of top-ups and diversions, as Mal and Cobb and Masha and Sie-Wan drifted in and out, it had culminated in a passionate analysis of Jungian theory that lit in Arthur a burning certainty that after all these disinterested years, Eames had let himself be won over at last. 

“Do I remember,” Eames repeats softly. “Yes, I have something of a recollection.”

That much was obvious from the detail. Every stud in the border that fastens the velvet into its mahogany frame, on either side of Eames’s shoulders, is distinctly defined, and Arthur’s confident that, if he looked, he could find a manufacturer’s mark. That was never the real question. 

“Why have you come back here?”

If he lets his own memories unfold, the feeling comes back to him. In the timeless confidence of the little bar, drunk on camaraderie and the mutual thrill of success, he’d sensed the change in their relationship like a great knot coming undone. The eager angle of Eames’s body leaning across the table, the unguarded light in his eyes, made him certain. Eames had become more than just a grifter who condescended to dabble in extraction. Finally, he had put aside his mockery and committed to their industry, and to the intellectual rigour that it demanded. 

There were no limits to what Arthur could accomplish with talents like that at his side. A brilliant mind, and a rock of confidence to anchor the team against the dangerous leaps that Cobb and Mal led each other into. A half-conscious future of ground-breaking heists had started to sketch itself out in Arthur’s mind, as he smiled like an idiot over his forgotten glass.

And then, sometime between 4am and sunrise, Eames had dropped the professorial tone like a cardboard mask, and leaned across the table corner to grin, “Let’s get out of here. It’s a crime to let a room at the Adlon go to waste,” and crushed all of Arthur’s silly, extravagant hopes into the sordid routine of a pick-up line. So Arthur had, equally routinely, shot him down, and the next day Eames had taken a plane to Cairo, to waste his time on some joke of a casino con.

“Why indeed,” Eames says with a wry twist of his mouth. He plucks a smoky tinged glass off the table and downs its contents. “Incurably sentimental, I suppose.”

Arthur reaches for a glass and takes a cautious sip. It’s like the orchard from the first dream. The taste reaches beyond his mouth. The bitterness wrenches deep into his bones, but after it, there’s something sweet and light that lingers. He puts the empty glass on the table and leaves his fingers curled around it. 

“Berlin isn’t one of your usual bases,” he continues, slowly approaching his devastating destination. “Did you fly in?”

Eames frowns. “You were on the boat with me. I dumped the Harley in Finchley Road. And before that, there was the balloon.”

A pause to allow the conscious part of Eames’s mind to observe the absurdity of that.

“What were you doing in Doha?”

For an instant, the confusion shows on Eames’s normally unreadable face. Then he says, “Sales. I was moving high-end furnishings for a ninety percent mark-up. You’d hate it, Arthur. Hundreds of Rococo shepherdesses and William Morris print curtains. Enough gold leaf to build an altar.” He glances up sharply. “But after that, there was the Caymans job.”

“Was there? Do you remember which passport you came in on? What was the room number?”

Eames’s gaze turns alert. The side of his thumb drags over the tabletop, as if testing its texture for signs of fabrication. It’s not hard to see him putting the pieces together. Testing the evidence of his senses and finding where they have betrayed him.

“I see,” he says and, between one blink and the next, he’s shifted into the lethal mercenary Arthur has met so many times in the dreamscape. Shoulders drawn in to create a false impression of indolence, he darts pinpoint glances beneath his eyelashes as he scopes out the room for threats. “How do we get out? Do you know whose build we’re in?”

The tempo of the music steps up urgently. Eames reaches under the table, no doubt for one of those pieces of heavy artillery he favours in times of crisis, ready to blow this dream into history, wipe his own memory clean, and take them back to square one. 

“Wait,” Arthur tells him, reaching across but stopping short of making contact. “Think back. Do you know how long you’ve been dreaming?”

Eames’s gaze turns distant, allowing Arthur the freedom to observe the darkening of his expression as, step by step, he follows the dream back to its genesis. 

The battle-ready impetus slumps right out of his shoulders. “Cognac, Arthur? I can’t stand the stuff.”

In the long silence that follows, the music dies away to a faltering drum beat and then stops. The light loses its golden glow. Arthur waits for the question. The rehearsed explanation is ready on his tongue, but he waits, while Eames bites the haggard corner of his thumbnail and looks anywhere but at Arthur. Then he stands up and climbs the stairs back onto the street. 

The Amazonian heat clutches Arthur like a great fist when he follows. It’s a hostile, shrivelling heat now, but Eames is striding through it, so he makes himself move. 

He’s reached the waterfront when Arthur catches him, squatting at the end of a pontoon to trail his hand in the water. It’s more fin than hand when he withdraws it, but the webbing quickly vanishes. He stays there, with the afternoon slant of the sun sketching in the contours of his back and shoulders. The glitter off the brown water is painful. 

“What did you want to know, Arthur?” he asks. “What was so terribly confidential that you couldn’t ask me man to man? You can tell me now. It hardly matters.” 

“Saito. Someone had been talking about that last job. It wasn’t the sort of breach I could ignore.”

Eames rounds on him then, his voice still killingly polite while the ready tension in his arms conveys a more menacing message. 

“Well. I trust you have your answer now. You should go.”

Arthur stands his ground. The river has turned choppy, waves striking the piers with a clap. “I checked on you last. I eliminated all the others before I came to you.”

“I appreciate the compliment,” Eames informs him curtly. “Goodbye, Arthur.”

Between one blink and the next, Arthur is back in his hotel room, staring at the ceiling he has come to hate. The PASIV gauge reads six minutes to go. Beside him, Eames’s chest continues to rise and fall in these same monotonous rhythm. Apparently he has enough control to throw Arthur out of the dream without so much as a kick, but back here in reality, his body is too helpless to even raise an eyelid. 

**

When Arthur has gone, Eames wades into the water and floats on his back for a bit. If he concentrates, he can give the sunlight a biting burn that’s almost as convincing as reality. He lets the river carry him downstream to where the caimans congregate on the silty shore, then switches the direction of the current to bring him back again. Sitting on the pier, he tries to tune into the conversation of the snack vendors behind him. They speak the same ungrammatical Portuguese as Eames does, filling in the gaps with English. They can’t tell him anything he doesn’t know already, or hasn’t thought of himself. He swears at the prospect of a lifetime of no surprises.

What he can do is build. He takes a church on a rock he remembers from outside Plovdiv, raises a Carpathian peak behind the town to put it on, and adds a gold plated Byzantine dome for the glitter. Just in from the pier, he crushes a souvenir store to add in the pub from Finsbury Park he used to drink in between jobs, which could always have done with some water views instead of the skips in the alley behind the supermarket.

There’s no reason to stop there, so he breaks up the skyline with some obelisks, and carves a canal where the main street should be, populated with gondolas and clusters of lotus pads. Alongside the fried shrimp cakes and corn cobs, the water-borne vendors start to sell those lung-scourging Russian cigarettes he used to like, and soggy London kebabs, and paper cones full of raspberries that taste stronger and sweeter than the ones he used to pick from the empty block behind the railway station. Their flavour intensifies as he eats.

And why shouldn’t it? What else would a master forger do but use his experience to fill whatever hours he has left. That’s the worst of it, of course. He could have years down here. Depending on what Arthur decides to do. Depending on how fast the time runs. Until one day, it’s all snuffed out – no warning, no ceremony. 

He died once already – pushing through the crowd outside a gelateria, he brings back the memory of the explosion in the kebab stall: the surprise, the obliteration, and then opening his eyes to an empty, unfamiliar world. He doesn’t fancy doing it again.

A condemned man is entitled to a bit of self-indulgence, he reasons, to sweeten the bitterness of having his end creep up on him unawares, so he razes half a block to make space for the modernist hotel they worked out of once in Belo Horizonte. Clean lines, long vaults containing all the neat, rectangular space a perfectionist could want. His steps are crisp on the wood floor as he walks through the lobby and down the glassed-in corridor that fronts the building, past the neat furniture in cream, chocolate and tan, the glass sculpture with its single stream of neon orange. It could be an obscure kind honeytrap, tailored to a particular kind of prey. Or just a flight of architectural fancy.

He sits in the hotel bar, on a high, uncomfortable stool, and looks over the town. He drinks the martinis at his elbow, one after the other, as he watches the shadows lengthen and shorten, lengthen and shorten. It rains for a startling burst, then clears again. The river’s surface goes as still as set toffee. He drinks another martini. He runs his fingers over the window in front of him, just to leave a streak on it. 

**

It’s the movement that catches his eye. Two streets away, a woman in a yellow headscarf pushes open a warped set of shutters and leans into the sunlight. Eames slides off the bar stool to get a better angle. His legs are stiff as an old man’s.

The window glass is grimy with dust and time, and the pitanga trees that started out as hedges are tall enough to obscure the view down to the riverside now. The woman’s expression is blurred and hard to read. She ducks away from the shower of peeling paint that her action has set in motion and retreats inside, leaving the window open.

The town looks battered and baked. Even the newest of Eames’s buildings are caked in dust. The streets are lined with debris left by years of flooding. And yet, as he watches, an automated street sweeper rounds the corner into view, huge steampunk cogs turning, and powers onward.

He recognises Arthur’s purposeful tread on the floor behind him. 

“Hear me out,” Arthur says obstinately, before he has even come to a halt. 

He turns in time to catch a quickly suppressed look of pain that clenches Arthur’s eyes. There’s a dusty handprint on his jacket sleeve as Eames glances him over, and a slightly off-centre set to his collar, and Eames wonders what his subconscious might have done to him out there, set loose.

“I didn’t have all the facts,” Arthur says in the calm, bulldozer manner he uses when discord among the team puts a job in jeopardy. “You have to know that. You vanished out of the field without a word. There was no way I could have guessed.”

Arthur uses these planks of obvious conclusions as a foundation for a more ambitious step. It’s a tactic he’s used himself, wielded in reverse, when faced with Arthur at his most intractable. Eames can predict where he’s heading now. Normally, Arthur’s rare mistakes cause him to throw himself, scowling, into whatever necessary miracle he has to produce in order to salvage success. But here, too late to change the outcome, all he can hope for is absolution. Eames is not in a mood to give it to him easily.

“What do you want?”

“To ask --” Arthur starts purposefully. “To find out what you want me to do.”

The very question, of course, that Eames has spent the last elastic stretch of time avoiding. 

Eames slouches against the back of the seat, hands seeking out his pockets involuntarily. “Apart from the obvious.”

“Apart from that,” Arthur repeats softly. “I’ve tried everything I can think of.”

And that’s the thing that makes his heart sink. This is Arthur, who’s been quietly testing the boundaries of dreamshare for so long that the PASIV is virtually joined to his flesh. When necessity demanded it, he’s seen Arthur create lightning, an eclipse, or even gravity itself. _Everything Arthur can think of_ is as wide as the whole industry. 

From not far off comes the beat of a chopper blade in the sky.

“Did you speak to Rashida?”

Arthur’s single nod tells him everything she must have said. 

“And Cobb,” Arthur continues. “And Maddox, the Agency, Army Research, Yusuf.” He sets his shoulders. “I’ve been thorough.”

“Of course you have.”

If it were anybody else, there’d be hope in the overlooked possibilities, the likelihood of small data errors, sloppy measurements, or rash conclusions. But this is Arthur, who doesn’t allow himself the luxury of mistakes, ever. 

Eames keeps his attention on the corridor with the sagging roof, the weak puddles of light that struggle in through the dirt encrusted glass. He doesn’t ask, what about adrenalin, what about sub-conscious stimuli, what about a different kind of kick.

“I have to make a decision,” Arthur picks up again dully. “It’s been almost forty hours up there. You’ll start to run short of fluids soon. If I don’t do anything.”

Eames can hear his heart beating in his ears, muffled but constant. But its rhythm is illusory – nothing more than his mind’s expectation of what it should hear. In another place, his pulse is counting down to zero. 

The living world is no more than a blink away. One tiny, impossible blink. 

Arthur says, tentatively, “It’s not so bad down here. The architecture’s got character. So do your projections, as a matter of fact.” He rolls his shoulder tenderly in its joint. “There’s a lot to do in a dream. Cobb spent years in Limbo, building.”

Over his shoulder stands a dull, looming mass where a thick cloak of dust has robbed the glass sculpture of its glimmer. 

“Cobb and Mal,” Eames says. “Not the greatest template for enduring mental health.”

“If you’ve got any better options at this point, I’m listening.”

Eames sees the spray of glass, fine as water, before he registers the sound. Arthur spins and goes down. A pistol appears in Eames’s hand; he braces his feet and fires towards the glint of a sniper’s sight on the opposite roof. Russian efficiency, Eames thinks as he clocks the broad, retreating black. The Russians never miss.

“Motherfucker—” Arthur has his hand over the spreading stain below his collar-bone, down on the floor. It could be a mortal wound. Arthur’s face has gone deathly white. 

He edges around to put himself between Arthur and the shattered window, to preserve what time they have left, and tries to put all the little thoughts out of his head to make space for one last conversation. 

“Don’t do anything.” 

Arthur’s only response is to lift his glare from his red hand up to Eames, and back again. 

Eames continues, “If it’s all fucked up, well it’s fucked, isn’t it? No point in dragging it out.”

It’s beyond him to stifle the fleeting, desperate spark that hopes for Arthur to turn that steady, meticulous gaze on him and say that it’s not all lost, not yet. That he’s got an idea. If he cared to, he could count a dozen moments when they’ve turned to each other in the teeth of a crisis, eyes alight with inspiration, and said _We need to--_. But Arthur’s mouth is tight and pale. He pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes his fingers on them as the red patch blooms on his shirt.

“Is there anything I need to do?” He lets Eames help him to his feet, staggers once, then tucks the cloth away and zips up his jacket to cover the wound. “Messages you want to pass on?”

“No,” Eames hears himself say. “My family isn’t like that. They’ll do the right thing, though. My brother’s in the law. He’s got—He can make arrangements.”

A subtle tremor comes up through the floor, he can feel it in his soles and ankles. Tanks or missiles or a burgeoning earthquake – whatever manifestation of distress his subconscious is failing to keep under wraps this time. 

Arthur plants his feet apart as if struggling to keep his balance. 

“Anything else?”

Eames is thinking about the false IDs tucked into the lining of his bag when he retrospectively catches the wrong note in that question. Arthur has crept a half-step towards him. A fractional difference, but the difference between safe and dangerous, all the same. The difference between professional and – something Eames knows he has to wrap his mind around. A painting falls off its hook with a smash, but Arthur doesn’t flinch. He shifts his balance, leaning forward. 

Between one moment and the next, they’re kissing. His hands are on Arthur’s face, his shoulders, greedily absorbing the texture of leather and skin, squeezing the solidity of him. Their mouths clash and scrape their way into the angle that gains them maximum connection, and then the kiss turns deep and satisfying, slow enough for their lips to part, and chase each other, and connect again. It’s the sweetest kiss Eames can remember. Like the berries from his second dream, the taste of Arthur’s mouth is more than it should be, tinged with built-up anticipation, and longing, and the little inaccuracies that separate imagination from imperfect memory. 

The point of satisfied curiosity passes, and they’re still kissing, Arthur’s hand stealing around to clutch the back of his shirt. Five and a half years, Eames thinks. They could have done this five and a half years ago, if he’d known that all he had to do to break Arthur’s powers of resistance was to die a little. The heat rises off Arthur’s throat, where Eames is stroking with his thumb. It’s the sort of kiss Eames has dreamed of and never had before. His whole body feels the caress and opens up for more. One of them makes a half-conscious sound of content.

The tremor in the ground has vanished. Everything is still. Centred on their kiss, Eames can sense the dreamspace all around him, like the extension of his neural system that it is. The city is a great mass of living brick, wood and glass, pulsing with the heat of the sun. Inside, the hotel lobby is like a ribcage made of beams and window mullions. And Arthur, Arthur whose presence here is nothing but disconnected thought, not a molecule on him, Arthur his mind can feel more clearly that anything. The nimble, ever-shifting web of his thoughts. The dark red knot of the wound in his shoulder. And the elusive, ghostly phosphorescence of his conscious being.

That’s when he knows for a certainty that, here in the dimension of his own creation, he can shape Arthur’s thoughts. Nothing so chancy as inception. All it will take is the right deft, intuitive tweak of the threads he can practically see in his mind. As Arthur catches a breath and closes back in, the conclusion fills his veins like intoxication. He could keep Arthur down here. He could make Arthur want to stay. Time is his plaything in the dream. Between now and the kick is all the forever he could want. 

Arthur breaks away with a grimace, still keeping his grip on Eames’s shirt. His other arm hangs limp now, blood dripping from the fingertips. 

“Hang in there,” Arthur tells him in a strained voice. “Keep yourself together for as long as you can. I’m coming back.”

Eames lets his skepticism show, thinking how he could heal that wound and delay this parting. He could take to Arthur’s body like a sculptor, and his mind.

Arthur insists, “I’ll work something out. You just--”

He leans into Eames’s mouth and picks up where he’d left off. Winds his good hand around Eames’s neck and holds tight. Try as he might, Eames can’t lay hold of the anger and shock he’d used to throw Arthur out of the dream last time. With every moment it gets harder.

But when he opens his eyes, the shattered window is just a step away. He kisses Arthur one last time and shoves him square in the chest. Cat-footed, he almost catches himself, fingers grasping at Eames’s collar, but Eames jerks away and he falls. As he hits the ground below, his body disappears, as if swallowed up by the pavement. 

A single button, ripped from Eames’s shirt, strikes the floor. It bounces once, twice, and skitters off into a corner. The silence that follows is awful.

Eames feels around in his mind for the beams that hold the hotel together and he brings them down. 

**

Arthur puts the last of his memory sticks and his phone into the empty hotel kettle, throws a cigarette lighter in after it, and flips the lid down. The electrical switch he’s inserted between the kettle and the wall socket is set for three hours. The fire shouldn’t spread beyond the bathroom sink, or put other lives at risk. It only needs to be big enough to be sure of leaving no loose ends.

“And that,” Arthur says into the desk phone wedged at his neck as he surveys the set-up, “is why I’m not doing it your way. I’m not going to ask him to jump off a tower, or whatever you did with Mal. I’m going deeper. Three levels with a sequenced kick. The momentum is the best chance of snapping him out of it.”

Down the line comes an unhappy silence, then, “Don’t get carried away, is all I’m saying. The evidence says you’re probably taking this chance for nothing.”

Arthur puts the four pills in his mouth and knocks them back with his water bottle.

“Since when does one single patient in Mombasa qualify as evidence?”

“And the Army Research cases. Four of them, last I heard. No improvement.”

Arthur takes another swig of water, too tired to quibble about yet another guilty omission. Four. Of course Cobb would have known more than he’d passed on. It doesn’t matter. He can’t let it matter. 

“Yeah, well,” Arthur tells him. “Army Research are a bunch of quitters. Won’t be the first time we’ve done something they said was impossible.”

In a guilty omission of his own, he doesn’t mention that he’s leaving Cobb’s name, number and address written on the monogrammed notepad by the phone. What’s left of their friendship is no longer enough to earn him a favour of that scale, but if Cobb wants to continue his low-key suburban lifestyle, he’ll be forced to call on every powerful ear he still has at his disposal to hush this thing up, if the worst happens, to repatriate their bodies and contact their next of kin.

But perhaps he suspects, because he tries one last time. “Don’t lose perspective, Arthur. He’s a contractor. However good he is, it doesn’t change that.” Arthur stares at the blond wood panels behind the sink and bites his tongue. “Not everyone is worth that kind of risk. That’s what you should be thinking about.” 

“Gotta go, Cobb,” Arthur tells him. “Thanks for the – Gotta go.”

There’s a text waiting for him from Yusuf.

 _Try to remember,_ it reads, _that you could make it worse. Ask him what he wants to do. And listen._

Arthur takes the phone apart and slips the sim into the kettle with the rest of the information that he doesn’t want to leave behind. 

Asking would, by definition, sabotage everything. Eames has to slip from his own dream into Arthur’s three-level substitute without knowing, and wake his way through them one by one, like in natural sleep. The whole plan depends on Eames being oblivious. The last thing Arthur can do is discuss it with him. 

By the time he sits on the floor, his peripheral vision is getting blurry. He quickly tears open two new needles and hooks them onto the PASIV lines. Eames’s arm rolls easily as he presses around for a new vein beside the three fresh puncture marks. The needle’s point slides in with no resistance. His fingers are starting to feel a little numb as he gets his own line in. But that’s how it has to be. Arthur’s bloodstream has to provide all the sedative required to keep the dream levels stable. That way, Eames’s system stays clean. That way, his chances of waking up increase from minuscule to merely unfavourable.

With three deep breaths, Arthur pushes the button and sinks down onto the carpet.

He’s only been here once, but he recognises the location the moment he opens his eyes. The summer air clings to his skin. There’s the decaying sweet smell of small, seedy figs trodden into the pavement. The afternoon sun strikes an aggressive glimmer off the harbour’s choppy surface. The arched grey bulk of the bridge stands over the city, dominating the view. 

Arthur follows the familiar streets, through the mix of heritage cottages, low-rise apartments and the quietly ostentatious new mansions that cover the slope down to the harbour cove below. They spent almost two days in Sydney, when the job on Robert Fischer was reaching its culmination, triple-checking the small details and doing their best to keep their focus honed while they waited for the LA flight. 

Only Eames’s build isn’t quite the same city. There are paragliders and surfers on the harbour, finding unlikely waves among the ferries and the sandstone bridge pylons. In the cove below, Fischer Senior’s yacht now floats off a white sand beach, complete with a tall iron lifeguard tower, a volleyball match, and a border of palm trees.

It’s all more charming than a muddled-up memory should be. Arthur mistrusts the gladness that creeps up on him as he pulls the house key from his pocket and fits it in the lock. The floorboards in the dark hallway creak the way he remembers. The bedroom doors are closed. 

When the hall opens up into the glassy modern extension, face-on to the water and filled with sunlight, Eames is posing in front of a full-length mirror, shoulders squared in a suit jacket. Even on Eames’s own body, Arthur recognises the stiff, desk-bound menace of Robert Browning. 

“Shows the stress in his neck and back,” Eames says over his shoulder, as if they were half-way through a conversation. “He knows how to keep his hands under control, but it always finds a way out.”

Arthur watches him compress the deceptive indolence he wears in his own body, with a tightening of hips and cramping of shoulders, into someone else. Then he throws it off and drops loose-limbed onto the sofa.

“Everything under control?” Eames asks easily as he shrugs off the jacket. 

Arthur doesn’t think he’s talking about the bigger problem. One of Ariadne’s sketch pads is sitting on the coffee table. There’s a cup of Yusuf’s tea, still steaming, on the bookshelf. Authentic details surround him, from the dead flies on the window sill to the pastel pink kettle. 

He tries, “We ran into a bit of a hitch with-”

“Nothing you can’t handle, though. Give yourself a night off. There’s a basement jazz club down near the Quay we should try.”

It’s impossible to know whether Eames has demolished part of his memory along with his previous dream levels, or whether he just wants to pretend. 

Arthur can work with that if he has to. All he needs is to get Eames to sleep, unsuspecting and without sedative, long enough to put a needle in him.

“You know you can climb the bridge here,” he says. “Think you’re up to it?”

Eames’s grin lasts right through the gruelling climb, and through every one of the obstacles Arthur sneaks into their path to make the physical exertion last as long as possible. They earn every step of the view – Eames’ subconscious does them no favours by fudging gravity, as if he relishes the exertion as much as the success. 

It’s late by the time they’re winding their way back into the harbourside suburbs, but the sun remains stubbornly high.

“Long days here,” Arthur casually observes. “When can I see the famous nightlife?”

“Just say the word,” Eames replies. Their shadows start to lengthen in front of them, and by the time they reach the door, the golden light is giving way to grey.

On the doorstep, Eames says, “I’ll rustle something up for dinner. You’ll want some space to do your last minute reviews.” 

Then he turns back and adds, “Don’t have too much of a meltdown. You’ve put a good team together.” 

And that’s something else he’d forgotten: the off-handed note of affection that had crept – so fleetingly – into all his dealings with Eames at the end of that extraordinary job. 

It wasn’t just Arthur, either. He can picture Eames and Yusuf winding each other up good-naturedly about rugby codes while they stacked coffee cups in the dishwasher. Or Saito illustrating foreign currency hedges with boxes and arrows in Ariadne’s sketch book, while Eames interjected with confident jargon about withholding tax and off-shore SPVs. 

All of this – the camaraderie of an excellent team launching into a challenge at the very brink of their talents – had got lost in the shadow of Cobb’s betrayal, smothered in self-recrimination and ruthless retrospection. His lasting memory of Eames has been his cool departure from LA airport without so much as a nod of farewell, and his subsequent unexplained silence. 

The smell of smoke draws him outside. The barbecue, he remembers, that he’d spent the last afternoon in Sydney disassembling and cleaning, for something to focus on.

As he steps outside, the details in that corner of the backyard are striking under the overhead light. The sun-warped green garden hose. The browning frangipani flowers from next door. Every knob on the barbecue is in place, and every stripe on the deck chairs leaning against the back wall. 

Gin and tonic, Arthur remembers out of nowhere. 

Eames had mixed them, with a neat wedge of lime and two palings of cucumber in each, and leaned against the end of the barbecue when he delivered Arthur’s glass. He’d stayed to watch Arthur flip the steaks and said something about koala meat that Arthur had laughed at. He’d looked up at Eames then, Eames with the late afternoon sun behind his broad shoulders and his face alight with pleasures that belonged in simpler lives than theirs, and looked away again and diverted them firmly onto professional territory with a question about Browning’s handwriting.

“Here’s your reward,” Eames says from the empty backyard, back in the dream, and climbs the stairs with a plate full of steak, mushroom and charred onion. “Make the most of it.” 

The night is sticky and still by the time they’ve eaten. Since Eames’s memory has sketched in the bottle of shiraz they’d found in the kitchen cupboard, they sip a third leisurely glass and look out at the towers of light on the other side of the water. For a while, it’s silent.

“I nearly turned it down,” Eames says quietly, eyes on the harbour view. “This job. Cobb’s pitch was --off. Too smooth, even for him.”

His chin rests on his arm on the back of the sofa. 

“But then?”

Eames gives a small twist of a sideways smile. “I guess I’m a sucker. The more impossible he made it sound, the more hook I swallowed. Just to see your scowling face when we pull it off.” He deposits his empty glass on the floor and slumps himself back into the cushions. “And we will, you know.”

Eames has never been a team player. He has a mile-long list of people he refuses to work with – the cowboys, the autocrats, the stick-in-the-muds. But by the time they got to Sydney, Eames’s taunts had grown gentle and fond. He had settled into their mismatched team like someone who meant to stay. It was Arthur, watching Cobb day and night for the duplicity that he sensed all along but discovered too late, who’d been too distracted to notice.

Sleepiness is starting to draw Arthur’s guard down, too, and these slow, intimate chats are the sort of luxury that their work practically never allows. If he fucks up this plan, then this is the last human interaction Eames will get to have. He wants to string it out, but Eames’s eyelids are decidedly drooping now, and he’s lying on the sofa with his feet up. 

“No regrets then?” He lets himself give it an intimate, low-down inflection.

Eames manages a fond smile. “Wouldn’t have missed any of it,” he says, and for a moment, his expression turns lucid. “This bit most of all.”

After that, his eyes close for good.

Arthur shakes himself out of his seat and fetches the PASIV from the room that used to be Cobb’s. His steps are unsteady by the time he sags onto the thin strip of sofa in front of Eames’s chest. That must be ten minutes up top – long enough for the massive dose of tranquilisers to start take hold of him. 

Fumbling with the line, he thinks how strange it is to be sitting like this. Dreams are always wakeful, the subject’s sub-conscious full of action, dreaming of broad daylight or a noisy, neon-lit night. As for the professionals, they know the hazards of sleeping all too well to let themselves close their eyes in a dream unless they have to. 

Yet here is Eames, asleep up top, and asleep in his dream, as defenceless as Arthur has ever seen him. He touches Eames’s temple, thumbs over the slicked-down hair. “Wake up,” he murmurs. “Eames, you smart-mouthed fucker. Wake up. You’re too good to waste like this.”

But Eames just wriggles sleepily, rolling towards where Arthur is indenting the sofa cushion, his cheek coming to rest against Arthur’s knee.

“Shit.” There are men like Cobb – like Saito – who play with other people’s lives like toys and never seem bowed down by the weight of their choices, but Arthur hates the power of the decision in his hands right now. 

He knows how scrambled up a brain can be, after too much somnacin. When he met Mal, they were working on some of the early military test cases, left over from before they worked out how to lower the doses. Those broken soldiers were plagued by black, soupy dreams, full of vast, hissing shadow monsters and endlessly collapsing ground, or churning acid oceans that swallowed you down like a leaf. 

Yusuf couldn’t be sure of the right dose to use on Eames’s already compromised system. If he’s guessed too high, and Arthur’s three-level kick fails, then that’s the sort of hell Eames will have to live in for as long as his body survives.

Arthur repeats his curses passionately and rubs his uncooperative eyes with the heels of his hands. He can’t lay hold of the confidence he’d felt up top. Would he wish that on Eames? Eames is content here, in his high-spirited dream worlds. Who is Arthur to take that away from him, at the risk of giving him something worse?

The chances of success are one in ten. “Probably lower,” Arthur says to himself. “Much lower.”

He catches himself tilting forward, vision darkening, and jerks back up. Cobb is the one to throw himself into bad odds and pull off a stunning success – or, other times, endure the casualties of failure. Arthur pulls the line out of Eames’s arm and drops it. 

“Okay, here’s the deal.” Sleeping the dead sleep of exhaustion, Eames gives no flicker of response, but his cheeks have retained the healthy colour of exercise and a solid meal. The low light from the table lamp leaves a pearly glow on his already handsome features that couldn’t make a starker contrast to the drawn, dehydrated texture of reality, and Arthur realises that his limits are not at all where he thought they were. 

“Here it is, Eames. This is my responsibility. I did this thing, and I’m going to take care of it.”

He shakes his head for a second’s clarity. It’ll take a ton of paperwork to get Eames out of the country in this state, but he can manage paperwork. After that, it’s just a matter of making the time. How much time he owes Eames down here is hard to say. What’s the price for one oblivious mistake? Plenty, Arthur thinks. He’ll have to spend a lot of time down here, to give the dreamscapes structure and keep Eames from drifting too far from reality. And in between, Eames can sustain himself with his dreams. 

“You can work if you want to,” he says, hearing the growing slur in his words, feeling his faltering grasp on logic give way to clumsy gut instinct. “I’ll bring the clients to you. Train forgers. If you like. Partners after all. Not how I wanted it. But still.”

Eames’s face looks at peace, down to the plump curve of his mouth making an unconscious imitation of a smile. More at peace than he’s seemed for years. As Arthur’s thoughts slip away like dead leaves, they leave behind a stark, determined trunk of certainty.

“It’s all right,” he says, shutting off the lamp with his mind as he gives up the struggle and lets himself slump against Eames’s chest and the sofa cushions behind him. “I’ve got this.”

Each blink seems to last for minutes as the drugs slowly drag him under. It’s gone silent outside. The world is reduced to Eames’s body, warm and breathing underneath him and he lets his mind drift, lets the hours drift by.

Far away, an alarm goes off. He’s faintly aware of its shrill, unrelenting tone, but there’s nothing he can do about it. His mind is going blank when it stops and starts up again.

He drags himself up. Outside, the city lights have vanished. As he watches, the twinkle of reflections off the water fades away, and the mast lights in the cove blank off. The darkness creeps up until, between one breath and the next, there is nothing outside the window but void. All that remains is the sofa, and the sleeping man beside him, and a moment later, all that disappears too. 

**

He wakes up staring at the white hotel ceiling. When he rolls onto his side, the room spins nauseatingly. The desk phone rings one last time and cuts off. 

Beside him, Eames is sitting up, clutching the side of the bed with the plastic line still trailing from his elbow. He looks sunken-eyed and diminished, hunched in on himself. His gaze is tracking around the room, piecing together the last two days. Arthur remembers sickly that the cheerful, unguarded Eames from the dream levels is just one aspect of the infinitely more dangerous man in front of him.

Eames blinks at the bar counter, which he last saw when Arthur was pouring him a glass of brandy and dimming the lights. 

“Get out,” Eames says, and puts his head in his hands. 

Arthur is going to argue, but then Eames knits his hands behind his neck, pulls his fingers tight until the knuckles whiten. In a strange, quiet voice that Arthur has never heard from him before, he adds, 

“I’m really very angry with you right now.” 

So Arthur throws the debris from the last two days into a dry cleaning bag, zips his suitcase and stumbles out.

**

The mezzanine level is all dark at this hour, once he’s clear of the lift lobby. Metal bollards joined by a burgundy rope seal off the entrance to the bar. Arthur lifts his bags over the barrier and heads for the darkest corner he can find. 

There’s a faint glimmer behind the counter, from the bottles standing silent behind the thick black grille. The other chairs, tilted forward from last night’s sweeping, give the tables a weird, multi-legged look, vaguely threatening. In his peripheral vision, there’s a shimmer that looks like dark things scuttling. 

He closes his eyes. A couple of hours should be long enough to pass some of the chemicals out of his system, and give Eames the chance to work off the worst of his anger. After that, he wants to put things right. That’s as far as he can think right now. The pockets of light around the emergency exits are starting to swoop like green comets in his vision, every time he squints his eyes open, so he stops fighting the dizziness and lets his mind go black.

There’s a torch shining in his face, next thing he knows. An Arabic voice – night security – throwing aggressive questions his way. Arthur says that he’s fine, he’s just killing time, but the words must come out wrong because the guard jerks back. When he tries to stand up, the floor seems to tilt, tipping him back into the chair. 

The numbness in his hands and feet tells him this is more than just 48 hours of unstinting work. The dose of benzodiazepine was slightly reckless, but only double what he’s taken before. He thought he could handle it. His head lolls back and the darkness swallows him again.

Louder voices. Torchlight searing the back of his eyes. He recognises the English speaking concierge from his check-in and tries to ask for a glass of water, but the two men just exchange terse glances. Their talk turns urgent. A cell phone comes out of the night guard’s pocket, and that’s when Arthur knows he’s in trouble. 

Whether it’s ambulance or police they’re calling, it doesn’t matter. All roads lead to the authorities here. There’s no leniency for drug-addled tourists. What’s in his bloodstream could earn him a year entangled in the slow-moving judicial system. But add in the contraband technology in his suitcase and that’s his youth over and done with. 

“Wait, wait, wait,” he slurs. He can’t read the denominations on the US dollars he pulls out, but he throws them onto the table with numb fingers. 

Then he takes the only option left to him. He scrabbles in his jacket pocket for the folded card with his room number on it and hands it over. The concierge gives him a look of disgust, but reads it anyway. Helpless to stop it, Arthur’s muscles give up and he crumples over the tabletop. 

Distantly, he hears a terse conversation that ends in assent. It’s Eames who hauls him out of the chair, his hair clean and damp against Arthur’s face, alcohol on his breath as he hands out quiet instructions in Arabic. Barely a blink after that, they’re back in the hotel room. He curls into a ball on the bed, feeling weak and miserable. Sometime much later, Eames drags him up by the back of his shirt and feeds him sweet, milky tea. Later still, there’s the second-hand smell of Eames smoking at the open window. 

When at last he recovers enough to roll, dry-mouthed and still nauseous, off the bed, it’s dark. The light in the next room draws him towards it. But it’s empty, not even a cup mark on the counter to show that anyone else was here.

**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks dr_lumieres for the retrospective beta on chapter 1. I hope I did a more thorough job on this one, but please let me know if I've missed anything.


	3. Chapter 3

Eames’s vanishing act turns out to be complete. 

After disembarking from a hastily booked flight to Dubai, he disappears without a trace. The high-rise flat in Doha has been cleaned out by the time Arthur locates it. His cautious messages go unanswered. The traces he fixes on the import business turn up no leads. The supplier in Canning Town has nothing on Freddie Slattery but a few thousand in unpaid bills. 

When he finally gets a line to Chen, and asks the right questions about the right chemist, he solves one puzzle. It looks to be Saito himself who’s found the lure of lucid dreaming irresistible; who’s sought out the recreational arm of their industry and put himself back under, where his secrets are open to plunder.

 _You were right,_ he types out from a bus station in Pennsylvania, _Next time I’ll come to you first. Now tell me you’re okay._

He deletes the useless text and replaces it with a better lure: a job in Toronto next month that needs some smart undercover investigation on the topside, the sort of character role Eames will relish. For the next two days, he imagines what it will be like to work together again, the slow and careful labour he’ll have to do to rebuild trust. He pictures Eames slouched in a chair in the briefing room, snapping out of his negligent inattention to point out a subtle flaw in the plan. He imagines Eames two doors down the corridor, sitting up in bed with a file of background material, waiting for Arthur’s knock.

But no reply ever comes, and he turns the job down, in the end. 

When he reaches Wyoming, the marine is a long way gone, after almost a year. His dream levels are dreadful, choking and black, full of treacherous ground that opens into quicksand or a sharp-toothed maw. Arthur never catches more than a glimpse of his mark, disappearing across a torn-up battlefield, or into the laneways of a city on fire. Not just the projections but every facet of the dream attacks Arthur as a threat, and none of his deaths are clean. When he wakes up, he feels as he never has before the need to touch his knee or his wrist, to make sure his body is still in one piece. 

He checks into a motel in the guise of a travelling software vendor, and spends two weeks trying to build enough trust to get the subject’s tormented sub-conscious to sleep its way to healing. It starts to wear his own mental balance to a thread. A red-eyed stranger looks out of the mirror, when he comes back from another one of the fifteen-mile runs he’s using to cleanse the last effects of the sedative overdose out of his system. He swaps his coffee for a peppermint tea and thinks that’s what a team is for, to stop you having to carry the awful weight of someone’s sanity all alone. 

It’s the mother who makes the breakthrough in the end, after hours of Arthur’s most patient training. Somehow, she convinces him to let his guard down long enough to sleep in the dream, and it works with him, just like it worked with Eames. The young man is slow and suspicious when he wakes. It’s hard to be sure how much of him has come through intact. 

But Arthur puts it all into a paper, anyway, and publishes it under one of Cobb’s old pseudonyms. Finishing it off leaves him restless. The sound of the traffic outside his city flat blurs into a monotonous hum. 

He takes the first job he can get, even though it puts him back on the CIA payroll. There’s a close call with border control on his way into Panama. As the customs officer beckons over the nearest armed guard, it occurs to him that there’s not one person on the team he could count on to knock him up some papers, or front up with an envelope full of greenbacks for a bribe.

Two days into the job, an email arrives. 

_Professor Lipman, I assume?_ is all it says. 

The sender address is Eames’s alias from the Fischer job. Arthur set that account up himself. It’s the work of a few seconds to trace the message’s geographic origin.

The job has three and a half weeks still to go. There’s no excuse good enough to mollify a team like this one. He puts the bare essentials in his day pack, fires two shots into the wall, and drops out the window.

**

By the time they reach the old Dutch Hospital, Eames has got the measure of the morning’s crowd. 

It’s a steamy, blue-skied Monday, sunburned and bleary eyed after the weekend’s excess, and they’re only half-invested. When he told the story of his family’s days in the nutmeg trade, he’d only won their full attention in the part about the first William de Kretser, who died fighting off a Portuguese pirate ship, and to earn even that, he’d had to embellish in a shipboard romance that dripped with anachronism. 

The sisters from Bristol, with their husbands in tow, were already stealing glances at the sea when he’d told his tallest tale, about his great grandmother, the illegitimate daughter of the Prince of Wales (he was never specific about which one) who’d stowed away on a merchant freighter to avoid an unpleasant marriage. He doesn’t blame them for their inattention. The waves look inviting on the other side of the fortress walls. The open water goes on forever. You could cross the equator and swim half the world’s surface until you hit Antarctic ice. 

A bead of sweat rolls between his shoulder blades, down into the damp waistband of his underwear. An unremarkable bodily function, sweat, and yet the tickle of its path grabs him. He’s got himself back on an even keel again, these last six weeks. But moments like this still disarm him, when an everyday act catches him with unexpected sweetness. 

He gets himself back on track. 

“My grandfather lost his left hand in that ward there.” He nods towards the middle of the second floor, above what is now a souvenir store, and decides to push the story a bit further today. He’s only got a few more days in Galle, before the south-west monsoon sweeps in and sends him north. Goa, perhaps, full of tourists hungry to taste the mystic East on every breath, who’ll swallow anything he tells them so long as it chases away the memory of beige office cubicles and 3am bibliographies. Then further north to Kolkatta, and up to the white peaks and misty valleys of Darjeeling. Or maybe somewhere with too much bustle for him to ever get lost in his thoughts: Penang, or Chiang Mai, or Hoi An.

“He would have lost both legs as well,” Eames continues, and they’re hanging on his words now, the macabre fascination of bodily mutilation never lets him down. “Lucky for him, the boat that picked him up from the ocean was on its way out for a mackerel catch with a hold full of ice.” 

The waitress at the ground floor café pauses with her tray of empty teacups long enough to glare him a reprimand but doesn’t interrupt.

“The Second World War could have gone the other way, you know. If not for the airbases at Colombo and Galle. History forgets the state the allied forces were in after the fall of Singapore. Devastated. It completely shattered their nerve. The Japanese were ready to sweep across the Indian Ocean and then up into the Middle East.

“Everything was in the balance then. If it wasn’t for that one small plane, if it wasn’t for the eagle-eyed pilot who spotted the vanguard of the Japanese fleet coming in for the big attack, that could have been the moment it was all over.”

The girls from Cork have peeled off to rifle through the t-shirts and fridge magnets at the souvenir store but the rest are listening. He tells them his grandfather was the navigator on that brave, doomed flight that shot off the radio message to alert Allied command to the imminent attack, moments before a Japanese squadron blasted them out of the sky. 

He winds up with a wholly fabricated story about Hunter S Thompson spending a summer in the family’s hill station recovering from a near-fatal overdose, and Lou Reed writing that riff from Walk on the Wild Side on their balcony one rainy, hungover morning. That should be enough to send them happy and humming into the antique store where Shahani gives him a cut of whatever their romantic mood charges to their Mastercards.

The Swiss guy has his phone out. Part of him hopes he’s googled some contradictory fact that he’ll have to turn his imaginative powers inside out to explain away. But no. He wants a photograph. Eames pops his sunglasses back on, puts an arm around his shoulder and gives the camera a blinding smile. 

As he’s pocketing the tip, it’s an absence of movement that catches his eye. A peculiarly focused kind of stillness that snags all his instincts and pulls them to the furthest table at the café, where an all too familiar figure is leaning back on the bench seat and watching.

He takes his time farewelling the last of the group, grinning on autopilot while his thoughts cycle through pleasure, anticipation and a fierce anger that takes him by surprise. When he turns from the last of them, Arthur is waiting. He hangs his sunglasses on the pocket of his shirt, a leisurely gesture so unfamiliar that Eames can’t think what to say. 

“A mackerel boat on the open ocean,” Arthur says eventually. “In April?” 

None of the ways Eames had pictured this moment took this particular turn.

Arthur continues his line of thought. “Seems a long way to go in the middle of spawning season, with a war right on the doorstep. You’d think they’d practically be leaping up the beaches at that time of year. You’d hardly need a bucket to catch them.”

Eames shrugs away a smile. “Maybe it was trevally. Never was much of a fisherman, my grandad.”

“I guess not. There wouldn’t be much call for rod and tackle on the Rowley Mile, would there?”

Arthur turns away, casual as you like, as if it were common knowledge that Eames’s grandfather had spent the 1940s in Newmarket, playing up his busted kneecap while he learned how to train racehorses and cheerfully rubbed shoulders with the serious end of organised crime, and never once set foot in Sri Lanka or on a war plane.

He waves it away with, “Other side. My father’s side were cut from a different sort of cloth altogether. You came here for the game fishing, did you?” Eames asks, slicking back his damp hair and pulling his cap down harder. From a distance, his memory seems to hold onto Arthur’s virtues more tenaciously than all his curt dismissals, those ruthlessly proven points and little airs of superiority. Now that Arthur’s here, in front of him, he’s not sure it’s a confrontation he should have invited. And worse, Arthur’s presence is doing something it has never done before: making him mistrust the reality around him. He glances over at the hospital façade and tries to make its pillars bend. 

Arthur has fallen quiet, surveying the square, the hospital and the tourists as if applying his professional eye for detail.

“I didn’t think you were the seaside type,” he says. “Isn’t it all a bit … predictable?” 

“You go where the market is. Gotta make a quid.”

The heat has become irritating all of a sudden, almost as irritating as the small talk. Eames turns away from the hospital plaza and heads towards the water, making for the path that follows the ramparts along the shoreline of the old town. From the top, all he can see is blue sea and endless sky, his favourite white sand beach on the other side of the harbour. He takes a deep breath and stops. The salt taste in his mouth is real. The Coke can bobbing against the rocks didn’t come out of any whimsical pocket of his imagination.

It’s a little while before Arthur reaches his side, and longer before he speaks. 

“You look good,” is all he says. It could be a medical observation. Eames thinks it probably isn’t, not entirely. 

“Come and see the sights then. Now you’re here.”

And he sets off restlessly around the walls, letting himself lean on autopilot a little. “This is the original Portuguese section. You can see the brickwork is smaller – messy too. The Dutch had a lot more time to play with when they repaired the fort. It’s distinctive work – cleaner lines, you’ll see the big, square bricks.”

Arthur follows him back down to street level when the wall gets too crumbled to continue. “That bit’s true, is it?”

“It’s all true,” Eames insists as he keeps them moving. At least, the history is true. Eames and his family are the only indispensable fiction, needed to tie the grand scale of world events down to something human that even the most distracted tourist can relate to and possibly even remember from their sofa back in Milton Keynes. “Churchill himself described the defeat of the Japanese fleet off Ceylon as the single most important turning point in the war. Criminally uncommemorated, though. Atomic weapons might have stopped the war like that, but without all the local heroes there would have been nothing left to save by then.”

This is the part where he has to watch himself during his tours, dial down his enthusiasm and keep it to clear, bare facts, because he’s as susceptible as anyone to getting carried away with the right sort of underdog tale, and the obscurest moments in history have always had a claim on his heart.

Arthur, for once, doesn’t have a superior fact to add, or an error to point out. He just says, “I never knew that,” so mildly that Eames’s heart skips a beat without permission.

They walk for a bit, Arthur turning silent behind his sunglasses, hands sunk in his pockets. At the southernmost section of the wall, where Eames likes to dwell on that mind-blowing twelve thousand mile expanse of empty ocean, they pause. This is probably the longest time they’ve spent in each other’s company without a team around them or a list of targets taking shape. Arthur finds a low section of wall for a seat, his back to where boys are diving off the wall for money. It’s new, the easy silence. It has no right to feel familiar. 

“It can’t be all that lucrative,” Arthur says, with his calculating face on.

Certainly it’s not the sort of income you could finance a jet plane on, but Eames has been funding his holidays off of this particular combination of history, fraud and theatrics since he was young.

“Expenses are pretty light,” he replies. “And the biggest risk is the low ceilings on the light-house stairs. There’s something to be said for playing it safe, it turns out.”

Arthur looks at him like there’s another question he wants to ask, but Eames moves on before he has the chance. 

The reach the end of the accessible part of the ramparts, where the wire fence of the modern military base blocks it off. There’s a thin strip of white sand below the wall, too far down for swimming but enough to stir up a craving for the cool water and the gentle tug of waves.

Out here, with the breeze on the back of his neck, the familiar burn of sun has driven his doubts away and left him at peace. 

“I’m all right, you know,” he tells Arthur.

“I can see that.”

“More or less.”

Arthur hooks his fingers into the wire fence, pulls at it a little, probably wondering how it would hold against a mob of projections. He’s unshaven, Eames realises for the first time, and his hair is a little bit clumped with oil. He just waits to see what Arthur intends to do.

“Your next tour isn’t until four.”

“I like to get some time in the water in the morning. Before the weather has time to turn. It’s one of the perks of not being on anyone’s payroll.” 

Arthur nods, thinking. “What are you doing afterwards?”

“Your state of the art surveillance hasn’t told you that already?”

“I’d like to buy you a drink.”

The simple invitation, that Eames had once anticipated, and then hoped for, and then resigned himself to never hearing, is too deeply laced with bitterness now to warrant a simple yes or no.

“Is that the best you can do?” 

“Eames. I dropped out of a job to come over here and buy you that drink. Half my luggage is in a storage locker in Ataturk because I couldn’t afford to miss my transfer. So I’d appreciate it if you could find a couple of hours and let me do this.”

As if that’s all it ought to take. As if there was nothing more on the line here than a newborn spark of attraction that only needs an opportunity. Eames leans back on the rampart wall and folds his arms. They wait for a couple with a toddler between them to go by.

“You’re a dangerous man to have a drink with, Arthur.”

Arthur takes his sunglasses off to rub the sweat away. In the bright light, his bones look too sharp, and in his face is some of the damage that Eames knows doesn’t show on his own.

“The PASIV’s in Istanbul. And that isn’t how I do business now. You know that. Look, you must have got my texts.”

Eames recalls the first one, a single stilted sentence that he’d deleted with the contempt it deserved, before throwing his SIM card onto the pavement along with his cigarette and grinding them both under his heel.

“I said I’m sorry. I misjudged a lot about that situation. In Doha.”

He has a sudden, vivid memory of Arthur half-conscious on the bed, cold and almost totally limp under the suppressive powers of whatever chemical combination he’d ingested, weakly coughing up the lukewarm mix of tea and sugar Eames had almost managed to pour down his throat. Then the next moment, harder to forget, when his gaze had rested on the free pillow on the other side of the bed, just a lean and a grab away, and he’d known he couldn’t be alone with someone so helpless when the anger in him was too overwhelming to even gauge the depth of it. 

There’s sweat itching his scalp now, an ache from the glare building behind his eyes. That room in Doha seems a long way away. 

“One drink then,” he says, and sets off back through the town streets towards the main gate, where he finds a tuktuk to take him round to Jungle Beach.

**

Later, chest deep in water, he looks back across the harbour. The town that was starting to weary him has been sparked back into life by possibility. Arthur is in there somewhere, evaluating a pair of pearl cufflinks critically in the palm of his hand, or napping off the jetlag in a downy hotel bed. It makes a difference. 

He lies on his back and kicks his way further along the beach. It’s all real, down to the light squelch of sand under his feet, and the approaching cloud bank he can’t move with his thoughts. Through all these weeks of mistrusting his own instincts, he’s scrupulously avoided any memories that could lead him back to those dreams that Arthur had trespassed into, but now his grasp on reality is strong enough to give it a go. He closes his eyes and remembers Arthur drawing a six-shooter from his hip, so clearly he can hear the exact clink of metal as he squeezes the trigger, the cartoonish _p-shaw_ of the shot, his aim steady and sure. He remembers the garden he’d grown, seeded from the coloured glass beads of a necklace, and Arthur putting a strawberry in his mouth, naked surprise giving way to pleasure.

He dives under to wash the sweat off his face and comes up feeling fit as a shark. 

The anger, which had overpowered him at first, is his to control now: to fuel or to let go, just as he decides. What Arthur did to him was unforgivable, but Eames does unforgivable things for a living, and he’s had enough time to reflect on the fact that, if it was too much trust that gave Arthur the chance to put the needle in his arm, it was too little trust that meant he did it without knowing the consequences. 

Eames is not a big believer in moral lessons. But if the mundane sensations of life like a blister or a cold beer bottle can make his chest pang with sheer bloody gratitude, then he has an inkling of what lies in store if Arthur has come all the way here for the reasons that Eames’s ungovernable romantic streak wants to hope.

He might just be ready to find out.

**

He picks the rooftop bar of the Lady Hill Hotel, for the airy view and the seclusion from the busiest of the Old Town tourist crowds. Arthur arrives punctually at 5.30, with the morning’s small signs of dishevelment washed off him completely. Fresh from the steep uphill climb, he looks so good in his white linen shirt with his clean hair just barely curling in the humidity that Eames is amazed more people don’t turn to watch him take his seat. 

They drink the gin and tonics Eames orders, looking out over the green slopes and red-tiled roofs of the Fort district, and pick at just enough crisps and nuts to keep themselves pleasantly disinhibited. They get a pretty display of apricot and pale pink as the sun sets, precisely at 6pm, and the hills start to succumb to shadow around the lit squares of windows.

“How many cities have we worked in?” Arthur says, watching the colours deepen. “We didn’t do this enough.”

Eames talks about the first time he worked here, when the civil war was still tearing the country apart and the tourists who braved the risk were a different kind, exactly the wrong audience for Eames’s quaint colonial fictions and, after less than a week, a run-in with the police had sent him right back to Goa, which, until the end of time, would always have room for a man of his talents.

“It’s all changed,” he says. “Now that it’s safe. Safe and cheap and surrounded by beaches – you can’t beat that. There’s a type that comes here. Just old enough to remember that schoolroom map with the pink Commonwealth territories stretching all around the globe, and they want to see what it looked like. They come here to reassure themselves that being a town planner or a doughnut franchisee in Lincolnshire is better than being a town planner or a donut franchisee anywhere else. I don’t mind taking their money.” 

“And after that? Then what?”

It’s tempting to spin something far-fetched and impressive. Instead, he drains the last of his drink around the ice and signals for another round. Arthur’s matching him glass for glass and not looking for an excuse to stop. He has the feeling that the truth, or something close to it, is all he needs for tonight.

“After that I’ll find the next thing that needs to be sold or stolen. Won’t I?”

Arthur mentions a conference he wants to go to in the winter. There’s a panel on retinal scan technology and identity theft, so it still qualifies as shop talk, but then it turns out the conference is in Antwerp and one or two supposed Breughels have passed through Eames’s hands over the years, so they get to talking about the Flanders school, and church architecture, and preserving agents for wool tapestries. Eames put a Hieronymous Bosch triptych in a dream level once, for the unsettling apocalyptic insinuation, and he gets part-way through recounting the story before it occurs to him that this is something he will never do again. A pleasure – an achievement – wholly consigned to his past. The lime wedge he’s squeezing into his drink spits an angry trail up the side of the glass.

It’s Arthur who brings up the last paper he published, about the marine from Wyoming. He starts out cautious, but Eames’s curiosity gets the better of him and he ends up asking the same questions he would on any job that threw up a particularly diabolical technical hurdle, never mind how close that hurdle had come to rendering him permanently comatose. 

“That should have taken a week at least,” he frowns when Arthur starts to flesh out his methods.

“Should have, yes,” Arthur says. “Except it turns out you can run more than five sorties in a day, if you keep them short. So long as you don’t mind feeling like you’ve been hit by a steamroller afterwards. I went as high as nine.”

A stupid thing to do for a point man by himself, without a team around him to notice if his grasp on reality started to wither away. Eames lets his face say it for him. 

He adds: “Not to mention the physical damage. Show me.”

There’s something distantly erotic about watching Arthur roll his sleeve up, deftly handling the crisp folds of linen. The fine skin inside his elbow only shows tiny depressions now, but a shocking number of them, following the veins like a child’s finger painting. It’s a miracle none of his blood vessels has collapsed. Eames’s mind fills in the ugly mess of red raw irritation that would have been there. 

There it is, he thinks out of nowhere. The last of his anger slips through his fingers and melts away.

He touches the clean part of Arthur’s forearm, just under the cluster of scars. “And you were working a new job back-to-back on this one? I thought you were smarter than that.” 

“I didn’t have anything better to do. At the time.”

He doesn’t need to feel for an escalation in Arthur’s pulse. Alcohol has lowered his guard enough to make it obvious. Eames’s mind puts it together at last: the eager slant of his body over the table, the split second snag of his gaze on Eames’ hands, his mouth, the neck of his shirt. He could take Arthur home right now. If he wanted to make it easy.

He orders a bottle of soda water and some curry roti.

“Look,” Arthur says, and refolds and straightens the paper napkin the waiter has left. “I’ve had some time to think about what it would be like. If you quit.”

Eames says softly, “If.”

He gives himself a moment to let it sink in, as all those triumphant, adrenalin-charged memories seem to prevent it from doing. “It doesn’t take much imagination, Arthur. I’m already out. You don’t think I’m reckless enough to go back under again, do you? I’m gone for good.”

“Yes, I get that. I guess all I mean is it won’t be the same. Next month I’ll be working with someone new – and when I have to walk them through some basic thing, that you would have just known – when I’m looking over my shoulder every two minutes to check they’re not fucking around – Don’t expect me to send you a text about it, but I’ll be wishing it was you.”

Eames takes a long drink, and lets the cool bubbles grate on his tongue, just another one of the mundane little pleasures he can’t get enough of these days.

Arthur pushes the napkin away and adds, “I like having you on the team. There you go.”

And that is so powerfully strange to hear, in an industry where no-one has time for other people’s egos and a contractor who can’t carry his own emotional weight is a liability, that it makes him laugh.

“Thank you, Arthur. Your professional endorsement carries a great deal of weight.”

“Do you think I bailed on an Agency job to make a professional visit?” Arthur says, scowling now. “I didn’t come here to present you with some sort of metaphorical gold watch.”

Eames keeps the conversation carefully general after that, while they eat. They’re back to gin, and the bar is starting to empty out, when Arthur switches them back.

“Did you read my paper? The subject, McGill, I ran maybe thirty sorties into his mind and I still have no idea why he couldn’t wake up. Or why you couldn’t. Some anomaly in the compound, it could have been. Or a psychological vulnerability. We’re still in the dark.”

Eames takes a calm sip. “Rashida thinks it’s a genetic susceptibility. I tend to agree.”

“Even with a fully funded research lab, it would take years to be certain.”

It’s already been months since Eames did those calculations himself, and decided then and there that he was not going to torment himself with what was a practical impossibility.

“It was the inception that did it, you know. Almost ten straight hours of high-dose somnacin. I’d never had trouble, before that, bouncing back. I slept when I felt like it, and dreamed normal dreams full of nonsense, and everything took care of itself.”

Looking back, it’s amazing how easy it had all been, from his first forgery right up to his last. A horn blows resoundingly somewhere out on the water, and leaves a tranquil silence behind it. Arthur’s presence here is exactly the metaphorical gold watch he needed, it takes him by surprise to realise. Was he really going to walk away from six years of world-building without even saying goodbye? 

“I’m sorry. We could never have pulled it off without you. And I don’t just mean the forgery.” Arthur tips his glass up to drain it. “I’ve probably never said that before.”

“No, you quite definitely haven’t.” 

“I’m saying it now.” 

Over Arthur’s shoulder, the big table by the stairs is finishing up. Eames watches them stand up to go, collecting their handbags and hats, setting their chairs to rights, thanking the waiters one by one as they file down the stairs. 

“I’ve thought about it too, you know,” Eames tells him. “What the industry would be like without you in it.”

And there’s that smile, that Arthur seems to hide away along with his extra passport in the false bottom of his suitcase for the duration of each job, and only gets out for a select elite that Eames has never been invited to join. He spent a week in Paris eating his heart out over that smile, watching Arthur and Mal coming back from one Le Corbusier villa after another with rain-soaked shoes and inspiration lighting up their faces. 

“I’d gathered that,” Arthur says, softly, the smile not quite faded. “But it’s still good to hear.” 

Arthur glances over his shoulder to where the wait staff are clearing tables. “One more round?”

“Not for me. I’m done. How about I walk you home?”

“Yes,” Arthur says. “You should do that.”

They must put something in the gin here to counter-balance its supposedly depressive effects. That moment where Arthur gets up from the table is so beautiful it’s practically luminous: the lean lines of his body moving under soft linen as he smiles that nakedly happy smile that erases every other person in the room. Eames hadn’t known he could still feel anything as pure and unguarded as what that moment makes him feel. 

He pulls himself together and lets Arthur pay the bill.

The street is pretty empty by the time they leave. On the other side of the narrow road, there’s a rain tree, its crooked branches holding up a lush, flat canopy almost wide enough to park a yacht under. Eames walks them into the darkness beneath it, on the pretext of the panorama: distant, homely windows below them and the occasional slowly meandering set of headlights among the hills. They look at it longer than they need to. 

“Thanks for the drink,” Eames says. His voice sounds deep and hushed in the damp air beneath the foliage.

“It’s the least I could do,” Arthur replies distractedly, and steps around to kiss him. 

It’s an enquiring kind of kiss, unpresumptuous like the whole slow evening has been. Eames answers it with a hand under Arthur’s elbow, pulling him into a grip that aims for the right side of greedy, and damned if his eyes don’t close. It’s been too long a wait to deny himself the full romance of the moment. He tastes Arthur’s mouth, cool and peppery with the gin, just the faintest hint of bristle when their skin brushes in the back and forth of teasing angles. Arthur’s fingers catch in his shirt front, a hand comes up to cup the back of his neck. Arthur kisses the way he works, invested down to the last breath, and he’s exactly the solid, lovely fit in Eames’s arms that Eames always knew he would be. 

The kiss slows down to almost nothing before they ease apart. Eames is on the dizzy edge of arousal, holding onto Arthur’s elbow because he doesn’t trust himself to put his hand anywhere lower.

“That’s something else I’ve been thinking,” Arthur tells him, softly, against his mouth. “Lately.”

Eames kisses the smile he can hear in the dark. 

They take the steep descent at an easy pace. Back at the gates of the old town, Eames beckons over a tuktuk and watches him climb up.

“You’re not coming?” Arthur frowns when he gets it. 

Eames shakes his head. “Next round’s on me though.” 

He doesn’t need to put a flirtatious spark in it. He’s pretty sure he still looks indecently flushed.

“Goodnight, Arthur.”

** 

The next day he goes straight from his morning swim to Arthur’s hotel, the Bawa designed place on the rugged stretch of coast to the west of the town. It’s all airy reclaimed colonial grandeur, decorated with unfussy nautical references and minimalist dark wood. The elegant simplicity gives the spirit an instant refresh, even if it’s a mile too far from the nearest swimmable beach.

No-one will know him at a place like this, where the clientele hire private guides and drivers at a daily rate. He goes out to the terrace that overlooks the ocean and sits there breathing in the salt air, imagining a more liberating bank balance, until Arthur comes down around lunch time. He’s carrying an English language newspaper.

“You’re not eating here, are you?” Eames asks.

“You can introduce me to someplace better if you like.”

“I fully intend to. Six then?”

He’d only come here to make a time, but he’s getting a bit stupefied from the sun now, and nothing makes him feel alive like the tingle of radiation in the deep layers of his skin. Arthur takes a seat on the shady side of the table and reads his paper. Tea arrives, and a jug of water. Eames tips his head back, eyes closed, and listens to the occasional flutter of turned pages or the clink of crockery. In his mind, he traces the last six weeks back, and finds every memory where it should be.

“You know you’re burning.” 

Eames does know. That’s the point. The prompt makes him rouse himself though. The paper’s folded, and Eames realises he hasn’t heard the pages turn for a long time.

“I have sunscreen in my room,” Arthur offers.

That’s the sort of invitation that Eames would have pounced on, once upon a time, even if it turned out to be no more than sunscreen and a private glimpse of Arthur’s methodically arranged suitcase. Today he’s going to turn it down, though, and go home for a shower before his afternoon tour. 

He’d wondered where it came from, this lack of urgency. Wondered if Arthur had got less attractive to him after all that anger. Now he’s spent enough time watching him move, crisp and poised, through the tropical heat to assure himself that his appeal hasn’t dimmed. In fact, there’s a stillness about Arthur when he’s not on a job that Eames is finding deeply charming. Freed from the usual data updates and arguments about strategy, he doesn’t fill the time with trivialities. He waits to have something worth saying and, if given enough space to get there, falls into moments of quiet candour that Eames would never have dreamed of.

What hits him now, unnoticed at the time, is the intimacy of their time in the dream. It’s not lost on him that the one thing he had trusted in all that dreamspace, and trusted absolutely, with none of the defensive barbs of the waking world, was Arthur. He remembers the luxury of letting his guard down, and the satisfaction of having Arthur all to himself as he built him willingly into the stories his sub-conscious wanted to tell itself. 

It’s not something he could justify with logic, but he can’t un-dream it now. It sits in him as a certainty. There was something there, something mutual, and something solid. There was something that changed.

“It’s all good,” he tells Arthur. “I’ll see you tonight.”

**

The restaurant is just four tables in the front room of a guest house, a comfortable little place where the owner feeds customers like family. Eames occasionally brings people here if they get to talking at the end of his afternoon tour. There’s cold bottles of Lion lager on the table almost immediately, followed by a description of the evening’s menu that Eames says yes to before Romesh has even reached the end.

“Have a little faith,” he says to Arthur’s bemused expression. “The food here is the real thing.”

“They have food in Panama, too, you know.”

Eames makes a face. “Yes, but the company.”

“All right,” Arthur says indulgently. “There is that.”

Dinner is one small pleasure after another. The incongruous ease of Arthur raising a beer bottle to his mouth, his lips wet and smiling. The nearness of their knees under the table. Arthur eats his hoppers tentatively at first, but he watches the other diners, glances down to the angle of Eames’s fingers and thumb as he tears off a corner of pastry and scoops the curry into it. When their hands almost brush reaching for the coconut sambal, it sets Eames’s senses tingling with the possibilities to come.

Eames has already decided which way the night is going by the time the bill arrives. He scrounges in his back pocket for the afternoon’s tip money.

“Thanks for dinner.” Arthur looks at the pile of banknotes longer than their low denomination really warrants. Then he says decisively: “I’ve got four-fifty in US dollars, and a pre-paid Visa with about a thousand on top of that. Everything else I brought with me is traceable, with the right systems. So in three days’ time – maybe four – I’m going to get an uncomfortable call, and I’ll have to answer some questions about why I dropped out of the job and what my next move is.”

“Is that what it sounds like, Arthur?” he asks softly as Romesh takes the money away. “Are you giving me an ultimatum?”

“I’m giving you the facts. That’s all.”

Eames leans in, his fingers coming to rest just short of where Arthur is making an unconscious fist against the tabletop. 

“If money’s short, why are you in a four hundred dollar a night hotel room? The ocean view can’t be worth all that.”

“It really is,” Arthur assures him. “Come and see for yourself. I’d like you to.”

It’s barely seven thirty outside, but the sky is pitch black, completely drained of light. He likes the decisive nightfall of the tropics, where the sun goes out, and the neon comes on, with none of the interminable twilight that misses the best of both worlds. They bypass the persistent tuktuks outside the bus station and walk the Colombo road out towards Arthur’s hotel. The lorry traffic wafts them in diesel fumes, and the narrow, cluttered footpaths are a bit too exposed to swerving motorbikes, and Eames wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world.

Arthur’s room is all smooth, dark wood and whitewashed walls: exactly the sort of understated luxury he expected. An unadorned wooden frame curves over the king-sized bed. There’s a mahogany chest at the foot of it, where Arthur puts down the bottle and glasses from the bar down the corridor. The doors at the far end of the room give onto a private balcony, and when Eames steps out on it he has to catch his breath because beyond the balustrade there is nothing but a thin strip of greenery and the Indian Ocean whipped up by the first monsoon winds to pound with all its might on the island’s rocky coast. In a rhythm like a heartbeat, it thunders and grinds and quietly retreats. He had honestly thought he could not be more smitten with this industrious little corner of paradise.

Arthur comes out with the wine. “Up to standard?” 

The view is south-west, from here. Three thousand miles, skirting the tip of the Indian mainland, before you hit the east coast of Africa. 

“You didn’t oversell it, no.”

Eames stands for a moment and listens to the sound of the sea. The growl of the waves, the airy architecture, Arthur’s patient presence behind him, it all slots together into one moment of piercing loveliness, perfectly random, imperfectly real.

“I didn’t need to,” Arthur says. “It’s worth every cent.”

Arthur pours the wine in the weak light coming through the half-open door. 

“You’ve never put a toe in the water, though. Have you? The whole time you’ve been here.”

Arthur rests his hands on the balcony rail, next to Eames, looking wistfully over the dark water. The pool in the courtyard had looked neat and inviting, from the infinity edge on the coast side to the orange beach umbrellas. “You’ve got me there. I had one or two priorities to take care of first.”

The wine is French, from what he gleaned from a glance at the label, and it tastes like a respectable vintage. They tend towards spirits on jobs: it does the same damage faster, neater and with less weight to carry. All of this belongs to a different sort of life - the romance of wine, the leisurely quiet between them that feels like he could stretch it out all night. 

Arthur takes a seat on the chair by the door. The night is full of marvelous little details. The salt tang in the air. The simple craftsmanship of the glass that balances effortlessly on his top knuckle with just an easy crook of his finger for support. The recently undone button on Arthur’s shirt that he lets himself think about for an indulgent little while. The buttons will be well sewn and snug, giving just a little drag of resistance as he slips them free, one by one.

“It suits you here,” Arthur says, and lets the softly spoken compliment hang in the air for a while. “How long are you going to stay?” 

Eames lets himself enjoy the open meaning of the question, and plumps for the more prosaic interpretation. “My visa extension’s good for another two weeks. After that, there’s a guy in Hambantota who can fix me up some paperwork. Or I might head north.”

Arthur’s sitting loose in the capacious wicker chair, glass dangling negligently but his attention precisely fixed. 

This is Arthur slowly working them towards his goal, with the clear-headed persistence that Eames has appreciated over the years. And yes, it’s exciting to have all of that trained on himself, to find himself the object of Arthur’s dogged intelligence, his tactical creativity, his careful measuring of ends and means, his bottomless reserves of patience. But behind that thrill comes a flare of warning that he quenches from his wine glass. Because it might not show on the surface, but he died not so long ago, had his life ripped away from him without warning, and somewhere deep in his psyche is the fissure of imperfectly healed faith. He has to go easy on himself. The days he could have spent one delighted night eating Arthur alive and then cheerfully watched him walk away in the morning were a long time ago.

They talk about the state of politics in the UK, and kick around theories on how deeply extraction has been involved. Arthur tells a story about how he and Mal once did an extraction in one of the boxes at Covent Garden, and bribed a struggling tenor to repeat two passages from the longest aria in Don Carlos to give them time to set up the second level. It segues charmingly and without artifice into a different kind of story, about a younger, less competent Arthur ditching Spanish classes once he discovered that a word like _por_ could switch meanings from _for_ to _through_ or even _because of,_ with no logic except random human history. The silence that follows is comfortably free of expectation. Eames breaks it by mentioning that, before the opportunity in the Middle East came up, he’d been thinking of going back to Sydney, and bluffing his way into some sort of low-pressure office job where he could commute by ferry across the harbour every day and hit the beach on weekends.

“Stick with the weather, huh?” Arthur says, draining his third glass as if they might be wrapping up the conversation. “The tropics must be doing you good. You look great.”

“How would you say I’ve looked for the last six years, Arthur? Not so great, apparently. Not great enough for you to invite me up for a drink and a five hundred dollar ocean view.”

There’s a pause – the kind of pause that, on past jobs, preceded a cool reprimand and days of cooler treatment. But Arthur leans forward, as if trying to close the gap between them.

“All right, let’s do this.” He examines the last of his drink and finishes it off. “It was different back then. The work came first. Anything that didn’t serve the job, I had to shut it down.”

“You’ve been suppressing your attraction to me all of these years, have you?”

“There was nothing to suppress.” Arthur takes a breath and lets some of his defensiveness out with it. “I made damn sure of it. I couldn’t afford the risk. You always played it like a joke, then, but I was the one who had to make sure we all got out in once piece, every time.”

“I could name two different extractors, a chemist and a courier who you took a risk on. That’s not even starting on the pretty architects.” 

Arthur takes a while to reach for the bottle and tip the last splash of it into his glass, then settles back in his chair without drinking. 

“Okay. You remember that first job we worked, out of Minas Gerais? You walked into that room with a vintage kit bag over your shoulder and about a hundred acres of ink on display, and a minute later you started telling me how you’d picked up a taser and a sig from a coke dealer on your way from the airport. Fresh off an overnight flight, you dropped into a half-constructed build and fluked your way right through to the heart of the maze, and you followed that up with a perfect forge of a client you’d only seen on paper. So yeah, my job was to nail down the biggest risks on a job, and I decided pretty quick what I needed to do with you.”

Eames wants to linger on that fascinating re-telling of one of the most nostalgic memories from their acquaintance. But Arthur’s got them right to the sorest point, that Eames has to work out whether he can live with.

“That was then. When I was still in the trade. Are you saying I’m less of a risk now that I’m just an ordinary conman again?”

“I don’t know what you’re waiting to hear, Eames. I spent nearly two nights in a room with what was pretty much your dead body. It gave me some time to reassess. The things I thought were important then – they were – wait up.” 

He goes back into the room and returns with a bottle of water, then pours half of it down his throat in one thirsty drag. His fingers are wet when he hands it on to Eames, with a distracting trail gleaming down the side of his neck. Eames lets himself think about the salty, clean taste of his skin; the grit of stubble breaking the silky surface of him. 

He shifts to make space for Arthur at the balustrade beside him. 

“If it’s all too late,” Arthur goes on, calmer, “I’d appreciate the warning. I took a hell of a gamble ditching a job to come here. Half a million dollars and about a year of other people’s ground work up in smoke. And I still don’t know if I’m wasting my time.”

Eames thinks he knows pretty well, the way he leans his elbows on the rail to stretch out the slender line of his back – and there it is, that old familiar itch in Eames’s palms, the primal urge to grasp that lean muscle as it flexes, the dry-mouthed need to pull him close. He fixes his attention on the view instead, following the lacy white lines of incoming surf, and makes up his mind. 

“Now your choice of location,” he says. “That’s got you a long way. I can’t fault it all.”

Arthur makes an easy, appreciative sound. “It’s not even supposed to be one of his best, though. A kind of late-career compromise to top up the retirement funds. The real genius is finding this stunning bit of sea coast to drop a few blocks of brick onto, and building in these huge corridors so that the ocean winds flow through the space like breathing. ”

Back on more solid ground, Arthur seems to be reviving as he warms to his topic. “The Kandalama up north is supposed to be the real show stopper. This whole hotel built into the hillside, buried in vines like a bower, and inside all the fittings are just as luxe as this one. It’s less than a day’s drive through the hill country, plenty of chances to see the tea plantations, and--” 

The hill country could be on the other side of the moon, for all Eames cares right now. Arthur turns his face into the strengthening southerly breeze as he talks about hiking trails and cave temples, patiently entwining his own appeal, like the hotel, with the wild beauty of the sea coast in a neat piece of strategy that Eames could fall in love with all by itself. Between one wave and the next, his sense of self-preservation gets dragged away with the undertow. 

He touches the nape of Arthur’s neck and traces the ridge of his spine. Arthur cuts off mid-sentence. With his palm spread out over the negligible barrier of his damp shirt, Eames can feel the eager tension in him, the caught breath and slow exhale, the complete shift in focus.

“You were saying?”

Arthur pushes up off the rail and turns to face him, close enough that Eames has to choose between meeting the frank intensity of his eyes and snagging himself on the lure of his parted lips.

“I was working up to inviting you on some kind of road trip, I think.” There’s a fraught breath that Eames feels on his skin. “But all I can think about is picking the right time to do this.”

His mouth is less urgent than his words as they lean into each other, lips grazing so slow and sweet it makes Eames’s chest ache. Arthur kisses him again, slower, just a hot flicker of tongue as he pulls back and lets them both wrack themselves with anticipation for a few breathless seconds before he cups the side of Eames’s face and nudges in closer, hotter, as the kiss turns deep. It’s Eames who tries to ease them back to keep something more playful, something that he can last through all night. But the drag of Arthur’s fingers down the side of his neck sends an erotic spark through him, makes him fist his hand in Arthur’s shirt and pull him in tight and hard. Arthur curls both arms around his neck and presses closer, and for a long moment he gets lost in the wonderful grind of their bodies, the hot slide of tongues, the utter satisfaction of his arm spanning the trim breadth of Arthur’s waist. 

“Come inside,” Arthur says against his cheek. “There’s air-con.” But he’s licking his way back into Eames’s mouth, and breaking off into a murmur of approval when Eames’s palm slides lower. “No. Come on. Let me get these off you.”

And yes, Eames lets him drag them towards the room, and shove the wooden doors closed against the heat. The air is cool on his bare skin as he drops his shirt on the floor, and a half-second later Arthur’s mouth is on him, grazing hungrily over his jaw, down his neck, sucking hard at the muscle over his collarbone. 

“I could never-” Arthur’s tucking his fingers into Eames’s waistband, deftly unfastening the button. “Jesus, I could never have done a job in this state. It would have been a disaster.”

Eames laughs and pulls him up for an open-mouthed kiss as Arthur’s brilliant hands find their way into his underpants and close firmly around him. He’s hard in moments, biting into Arthur’s mouth as he loses his grip on restraint altogether. 

“I want – Arthur –“

But before he can even pin down one thing he wants, Arthur is sinking to his knees, mouth open hungry around Eames’s dick, engulfing him in wet heat and slipping free again. He takes one moment to look up, his dazed, dark-eyed expression tilting up to Eames’s face, and then he’s got his lips cinched around Eames’s shaft, pulling tight towards himself and sinking back down with all the lush warmth of his tongue and mouth. It leaves every fantasy of those long waiting years in the shade, the slick sounds of Arthur’s strokes, and the purposeful rhythm that’s going to get him there in – going to – 

They’re both groaning when he comes down Arthur’s throat. He pins Arthur’s hands in place where they’re sliding up his abdominals and loses himself in the mind-blowing clench of Arthur swallowing around him, again and again, until he’s empty of everything and pushing through pleasure into unbearable over-sensitivity. 

When Arthur stands up, he’s pink in the face and glowers explosively when Eames tugs his shirt button delicately open.

“No,” Eames tells him. “Let me.” He lets his fingers graze Arthur’s chest with the next button, and the next, and he slips inside to skim up his ribs to the thumb over the responsive swell of a nipple. “Let me have this. I’ve waited a long time to see you this way.”

Arthur answers him with a bruising kiss, but he lets him, lets him linger over the last of the buttons, slide the shirt off, trail kisses from the hinge of his jaw to the socket of his shoulder, lets him walk them slowly to the bed where he lays Arthur out and strips him bare, taking all the time in the world, listening for the wet catch in his breathing, the barely-controlled gasps. He’s achingly hard, muscles of his thighs and arse clenching into helpless thrusts every time Eames touches him. He kisses Arthur’s stomach, kisses the wet head of his cock to feel it throb against him, kisses his way back up to Arthur’s mouth. 

“You’re very quiet.” Arthur’s look might be threatening if his pupils weren’t blown to the point of delirium. “That’s not a complaint. Tell me something. Tell me what you like.” 

He takes Arthur in hand then, fingers moulding themselves to get the feel of him. 

“That’s good,” Arthur says, curling his hips instantly into the touch. “That’s amazing.”

Eames gives him a few slow strokes, watching the expressions chase each other across his face, frustration and overwhelming pleasure, and something that vanishes when he tips his forehead against Eames’s shoulder and grinds out “Keep going. Fuck, I’ve spend weeks thinking about your fucking hands.”

“Weeks,” Eames repeats, and does, keeping to the same maddening pace, then shifts his grip to Arthur’s balls, tugs them gently with the tips of his fingers while Arthur goes on swearing under his breath and rocking his hips into every touch, knees splayed open like a dream. Eames kisses his throat, stroking the line of his cock gently until he’s leaking and hot, sucks on his nipples to make him writhe in a vain attempt to get contact everywhere at once, and it feels like hours before Arthur’s grip on his hair pulls him up.

“Enough.” He pulls Eames’s hand up and licks his palm. The hot, insistent swipe of muscle kicks Eames’s spent system back into overdrive and gives him a new throb of arousal. Then he bites – hungrily, over the meat of Eames’s thumb, and murmurs, “Make me come,” and Eames’s chest hurts with how badly he wants to do that, and more, and everything Arthur asks of him with those beautiful, unflinching eyes. He strokes Arthur in quick, tight jerks, watches the tension dig its way into his brow, until he gives it up with a groan.

For a long time afterwards, he leaves his hand on Arthur’s stomach, riding the intimate rise and fall of his breathing while Arthur lies with his eyes closed and lets Eames drink in all the long dreamt-of little details, from the faint tan lines at the top of his thighs to the taut furl of his navel. 

Eventually Arthur runs a hand over his eyes and rolls off the bed towards the luxurious bathroom. And in that instant, to Eames’s sex sodden brain, it all makes sense: every inch of gleaming gold-flecked grey marble; every pile of starched towels; the pristine white spa bath and the beveled glass wall tiles; the dozens of little bottles and boxes all laid out with tape measure precision. It makes sense because no lesser place is fit for Arthur’s naked body in the moments after Eames has had him for the first time. 

Arthur throws a hot, damp flannel and a ridiculous bottle of lotion onto the bed when he comes back. He sits in the window seat while Eames washes up and slips down under the sheets, leaving what he hopes is an inviting level of exposed flesh. The lotion is pink grapefruit, but Eames doesn’t let that stop him slathering some on.

Wrapped in a hotel robe, with the belt cinched mouth wateringly tight, Arthur is too distracting a sight, so Eames checks out the shutters behind him – bright tropical blue frame with a pale sky coloured fill producing an upbeat splash of colour against the white walls and dark wood. They fit perfectly into the window aperture, snug alignment despite their heavy weight on their hinges.

“It’s not so bad, this place,” Eames says, setting the bottle on the night stand. “Well put together.”

Arthur smiles indulgently. “Welcome to architecture. So glad you could join us at last.”

“Not my line of work,” Eames shrugs. The thought turns darker. “Not anymore.”

“So getting back to this road trip.” Arthur crosses his ankle over his knee in a way that yanks Eames’s focus down to the shadow between his thighs that remains just barely obscured by the robe, and otherwise cheerfully continues his line of thought as if the last half hour had never happened. “The place you really want to see for landscape is Bawa’s first design, that he did for his brother’s property. I think you’ll like it.”

“Why’s that?”

“Colonial estate meets retro chic – your style exactly.”

“That’s what you think of me, is it?”

“That’s what I think of your wardrobe.” He jerks his head toward Eames’s discarded shirt. “And some of the career choices you’ve made lately. It’s an hour back towards Colombo from here, the estate. A bit past Bentota. Easy enough to get a driver. Or hire a bicycle if you’ve got a sense of adventure.”

It’s a stupid, reckless idea – not just the cycling but the whole prospect of jumping straight into making joint plans – so of course Eames says yes. Then he adds, “There’s a couple of guest houses that hire out, but you won’t get anything before nine. I’ll make some calls first thing tomorrow.”

Arthur looks troubled by that. Then he hooks his thumb in the knot of his robe and starts to tug it free, a few millimetres at a time. When it’s undone, leaving the robe hanging so tenuously on his shoulders that the slightest shrug will set it falling, Arthur says:

“Lunaganga can wait a bit. I have this hotel room booked for two more nights, and I was planning on spending as much of that as possible in this extremely well-constructed bed.” He shrugs deliberately and stands up. “With you.”

Eames pulls him in as he approaches. The smell of him is so familiar – the same clean, woody scent Eames had craved untouchably across continents and years, in warehouses and hire cars, intercut now with the intimacy of sweat and, gratifyingly quickly, the tang of arousal too. The bed bears up wonderfully to a half-hour of rolling and grinding, of keeping each other on the edge and then letting their self-control crumble to pieces, as Arthur’s attention to detail proves even more devastating in the bedroom than in the dreamscape. He’s mouthing blindly over Arthur’s throat when he comes, the entire world reduced to the steady grip of Arthur’s hand and the thumping rhythm of his pulse. 

He sinks back into the one remaining pillow afterwards, filthy wet and exhausted. It strains his endorphin-addled mind to trace back every step, every mad coincidence that got him here, but he can do it, and when every memory is placed exactly where it should be, he passes out. 

**

When Arthur wakes up, he can hear the waves, if he stays still. The early monsoon winds thrashing the ocean against the rocks. It’s interrupted only by the occasional footfall of efficient early morning staff in the corridor outside.

Eames is asleep. This should be completely unremarkable except for the fact that Arthur can remember with painful clarity the dead sleep of that hotel room in Doha – the empty animal matter of Eames’s skin and bones with all the character and all the future wiped clean off them. The fact that Eames is going to wake up is a little miracle that Arthur almost let slip through his fingers. 

He peels back the sheets, because he’d be an idiot to have a man like Eames in his bed and not take every opportunity to enjoy the view. But it’s Eames’s face he can’t stop looking at – the little flickers of feeling in his eyelids, the deepening lines around his lips, that make all the difference between healing sleep and the living death that was almost his fate. 

The damage of what Arthur did to him is not completely invisible. Arthur doesn’t miss the occasional instant of hesitation when he scrutinises the reality around him a bit too closely. There’s seams of scar tissue in his psyche that Arthur put there. Eames is not a sure thing. But then, nothing about them is a sure thing, or ever could be. Apart from all the logistical obstacles, and the functional necessity of living with false names and a constant gaze over the shoulder, there’s no guarantee that men like them can make their routines and ambitions synch together. But he knew all that when he climbed out the window of his hotel in Panama City with half his clothes still in the closet and the PASIV strapped to his back.

Arthur is not a man who believes in second chances – they’re nothing but a preemptive excuse for lack of rigour on the first attempt. But he wants, like he’s never wanted before, to give it a shot. And Eames is the one he wants to do it with.

It’s only the most fleeting kiss on the outside of Eames’s wrist, but it wakes him. As his eyes blink into focus, he’s murmuring something improbable about a jaguar.

He doesn’t realise he’s smiling until Eames’s traces the line of it with his fingertip, wearing an expression so easy and soft that all of Arthur’s thoughts go blank. 

“You should go get cleaned up,” Arthur tells him after a few moments, nipping at his finger. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

While Eames rolls on his back and stretches bracingly, he tells himself not to push. Only it’s strengthening, the thought he woke up with that the next thing he wants to do is fuck Eames in the sleepy languor of morning, slip inside him slow and thorough with the urgent edge of need worn down by last night. 

Because Arthur likes sex – and experience has taught him that this is not the truism it sounds. Most people like coming, and some of them have more elusive goals, like control or reassurance or just keeping loneliness at bay. What Arthur likes is the sex itself, and the particular combination of trust, skill, patience and sheer playful curiosity that he’s never found anywhere else. He’s had mediocre sex with plenty of people. What takes his breath away is when someone can meet him on the same plane, and he has a feeling about Eames. He has a pretty great feeling about Eames. 

If his instinct is true, behind all his flippancy Eames could be someone who likes undivided attention and a gentle hand, and Arthur is at his best on top. He works single-mindedly, he listens and responds until he finds what works, and when he gets there he’s got endless stamina, perfecting his technique to last and last. He can picture how it could be with Eames, who likes to let his mouth go during sex, who maybe wants to have Arthur bite his earlobe from behind and tell him how good he feels from the inside. 

With one last bone-cracking stretch, Eames slides off the bed and heads for the shower. 

Arthur has been wrong about a lot of things in their relationship so far, but this time he’s right, and right about everything.

**

The thing Eames had forgotten about Sydney is that the muggy weather can close on the city like a fist, and the bucketing rain only makes it clench tighter. It’s drumming on the roof – fat tropical drops – and spurting from the downpipe onto the street below. The apartment’s airy art deco dimensions have held out the weather so far, but the price of affordable water views is shoddy maintenance, and the moulding around the kitchen window is starting to weep a little. 

“Nothing smaller than a 737 will take off in this weather,” Arthur says, frowning at the curtain of rain that obscures the southern side of the harbour and the far end of the bridge. “I’m going to reschedule.”

He’s got a meeting at one of Saito’s newly acquired gas fields south of Broken Hill, with a senior manager who can use his skills, and maybe more than just his experience in extraction at that. It’s one of a lot of things they have to work out. 

“You should take it,” Eames tells him when he’s done on the phone. “Whatever they offer. It won’t take you long to leverage it into something better.”

Arthur comes around to stand beside him at the window.

“I thought I was negotiating for both of us.”

It still aches a bit, to remember the limits on that, but it can’t sit unsaid. 

“I threw away my totem,” Eames tells him. “In Atlantic City. Lost it on the jack of spades.”

It’s not about the fear of losing track of himself, really. He’s not like other dreamers. If he can forge, he knows exactly where he is, and if he can’t tell real from fake after the last few months then god help him. It’s the symbolism that worries him most. The emblematic trade tool he’s discarded for good. 

Arthur takes his die out of his trouser pocket and puts it on the window sill. It balances precariously on the peeling wood and a big drop of water falls beside it, shattering. He takes a couple of steps back, as if testing whether the distance is something he can endure.

“That’s not so bad is it?” Arthur says in a hush.

Eames picks up the die and puts it back in Arthur’s hand. It’s going to take a while to picture him without it.

Arthur closes his fingers, trapping the die between their palms, and squeezes tight. 

The rain doesn’t let up all afternoon. It’s as good a reason as any to draw the bedroom curtains and spend a few more hours sprawled out on the bed, sweat cooling on their skin under the lazy breeze from the fan.

**

The end

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has taken me a ridiculously long time to finish, like maybe 2 months of solid writing spread over 3 years of procrastination and guilt, so thank you for all your amazing comments and support now that I’ve got here at last. I hadn’t been to Galle when I started writing this. Now I have pretty grave doubts that Eames could get away with his money-making scheme for more than a day or two, but let’s give him credit for exceeding my expectations. It’s true the Lighthouse isn’t one of Bawa’s most celebrated designs, but I don't think I've exaggerated its harmonious simplicity and the magic it works with the spectacular sea coast.
> 
> Edited to add: I haven't drawn specifically on other works - in fact I go out of my way to differentiate - but throughout the writing process these same stories that draw on the same core tragedy kept coming back to me, so I thought I'd share them with you. lf you are looking for more of:
> 
> Eames trapped in an evocative dream world (with a side of redemption) – try [Metaphors as mixed as you can make them](https://archiveofourown.org/works/842751) by halflinen  
> Rescue from an inescapable dream (Arthur this time) – read [Release Mechanism](https://archiveofourown.org/works/513298) by witling  
> Arthur drops everything to help when Eames won’t wake up – try [Volta](https://archiveofourown.org/works/332624) by weatherfront
> 
> And lastly, since I wrote the line "between now and the kick is all the forever he could want", it's made me think so many times of [And in the Morning Head for Home](https://archiveofourown.org/works/339715) by SinOfPride. Warning for tragedy that will rip your heart out and no happy ending, and thanks to bradpittsgirl and inceptficfinder.livejournal.com for helping track it down.

**Author's Note:**

> St Regis, it turns out, is the patron saint of bleeding hearts. Or at least social workers, lacemakers and illegitimate children.


End file.
